When we start a meal of CI in our classrooms, we don’t need to clutter our students’ plates with too much food. We only need to offer them three basic foods – steak, fries, and peas. Steak. What is that in our comprehensible input classroom? That’s easy. It’s the main thing, the thing that our kids absolutely […]
This is anecdotal, with no hard data, but still is worth a short blog entry: In the past three or four years, We in Denver Public Schools have been pushing to allow with new standards and proficiencies at the national (ACTFL) and state (Colorado State Standards as revised in December of 2009). To our knowledge,
In the old foreign language classroom, the dynamic was very different. The teacher would only approve of the student if they did what they were supposed to do. The message was, “I will approve of you if you do what I want you to do.” But if we release the kid to be fully in
We wouldn’t want to fly a plane in a thunderstorm. In the same way, conditions have to be right for us to do intuitive comprehensible input (thin slicing) in our classrooms. How to get the right conditions to thin slice? If we are comfortable with the kids and the CI process (if we are going
Susan Gross is coming to Japan for the first time, giving a three day workshop in just a few days, September, 18, 19th and 20th, 2010. If you are in Japan or nearby, don’t miss this rare chance for the best TPRS training available in the world. The workshop will benefit teachers who teach any
Anne’s student J, a former Hog, in a recent blog entry here (https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7949), wrote to her former teacher about what college German is like. Here is a follow up. J writes to Anne: “At this point I have learned how to teach myself the grammar needed to do the homework exercises when before I was trying to do them
I have always been a fan of the Alaska group and particularly of Michele Whaley. They are on fire with new ideas and energy. I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that Michele has a new blog site: http://mjtprs.wordpress.com/ (Find other sites dedicated to CI/TPRS in the right column of this blog page)
Susan Gross is coming to Japan for the first time, giving a three day workshop September, 18, 19th and 20th, 2010. If you are in Japan or nearby, don’t miss this rare chance for the best TPRS training available in the world. The workshop will benefit teachers who teach any language and any level. For
One of Anne Matava’s awesome “hogs” is now in college. She wrote to Anne this past week: Dear Frau, First of all I hope you enjoyed the great summer we had, and that you are all settled in at school! I feel at home here now, which probably means I have settled in for the most
L mentioned in a recent email (I’ll soon get that into blog entry form) that she felt overwhelmed that we do so much. How can we fit all of the CI discussion, PQA, stories, reading, writing, dictation, and (more recently) culture lessons into one week? Let’s take a look at the history. (Please note that
L email of 9.7.10: I loved Los Alamitos. Looking back at it, it was extremely inspiring; it showed me how great TPRS could be. It did not help me at all to start doing it. I keep having that image about a little girl watching ballerinas for hours and hours and trying to learn how to
In Alamitos I met a teacher, L, and we talked about maybe blogging about her experience of what she learned this summer. The link to that first blog about L is: https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7686 Now that school has started I have received some emails from L. They express what it is like to really believe in an idea
