Just to reiterate. I see technology really helping, serving beautifully, my students, outside of the classroom. It helps them process so many things that are interesting to them, from songs, sometimes even in communication with kids from other countries, and so technology is a wonderful and beautiful thing for learning languages. It has its place. […]

About a year ago Michele/Alaska started thinking in terms of student focused CI classes, with Jim and others throwing out new ideas from time to time about how to get the kids to be sources of CI – hence greater personalization. Student generated stories, with the kids writing the scripts quickly in abbreviated form over

Check the tone of this email I got from a second year teacher. If this is any indication of the new breed of teachers who just “ain’t gonna do it” the old way, then it is very heartening indeed: “I will continue to read your blog for incredible insight to the CI process…I have grown

Well, good things are certainly worth waiting for. For those who kept up with the other 28 blog entries from K from last year (none this year until now), we can finally get an update on how French 2 is going for her. For the other ones from last year, just search “A Blow To His

I got this from Kelly (North High School/DPS) who observed last week. I like it. It makes me feel like I can connect with my colleagues, which is not always the case: Ben, thank you so much for opening your classroom to me.  There have been few times in my life when I’ve butted against

Here is a cool example of an embedded reading from Toni Kellen. I like its simplicity and clarity: Day 1: Tell story Target Vocab:  – meets Joe meets a girl.  Joe thinks that the girl he meets is very pretty.  Joe thinks that she is pretty because she has white hair and Joe likes girls

We work so hard. We slug. Especially in those years learning how to do the CI. We should be gentle on ourselves. I remember for the past ten years I would aggressively try to fill each class with only CI. But, lately, I have become aware of how hard that is to do in a

We have a store in Denver called R.E.I. which sells all kinds of camping stuff, mountaineering equipment, etc. I was near the section that sells hiking shoes when a lady came in and asked the salesperson for a pair of high heels. The salesperson said they didn’t have any. The customer pitched a fit. The

Ray makes a subtle point about the assessment idiocy in this note below: This year two brothers arrived to my elementary school from Mexico.  They had years of English classes at their school in Mexico before arriving to my school in the Chicagoland area.  Of course, their English language proficiency was not nearly as good

This is from Drew in response to Grant and Nathan’s desire to know more about the grading system he helped develop based on “10 learning scales for foreign language to measure kids based on their ability to use language, not to conjugate.”  When I start presenting the scales at training sessions I always start out

An insight into the doodling thing is to engage the doodlers in either a private or classroom discussion, but tell them that they have to “check in” with you visually from time to time. Like every thirty seconds or so. To not do so would be to convey the same quality of disrespect that would happen when

How do we know when to start stories? One indicator is the kids’ boredom with one word images or with anything that doesn’t have action in it. Static images can only be done for so many weeks. Then we have to get things going with some good, simple story scripts. We can only ask a certain number of times if