Does anyone know the number of words in the average person’s spoken vocabulary? We in DPS had lunch today and the number 250 came up. Whatever the number is, I know that when we hear it in workshops it is always surprisingly low. I mean, we can and of course will use some words beyond those […]
Every now and again I have to take comments and make them into blogs so that they can be searched. So sorry if they’re on here twice. Jim’s stuff below about illustrating stories (I asked him to expand on an earlier comment) expands on the original thought of how, mechanically, to get the kids into
Meagan is my colleague at East High here in Denver. Last week she told me about how a kid came into her classroom and asked, “Is it true that four year olds can learn a langauge faster than us?” I loved Meagan’s response: “No, it’s not true. That myth exists because of the way languages
Something else I am trying to learn to expand upon and repeat more and PQA more in a story, besides a strong image, is a well built sentence, something out of the ordinary. We get such sentences, perhaps something in the subjunctive mood, and we should circle them more, because they don’t occur that often.
If, in the middle of CI in whatever form, I come across a bit of content that has power, I try to expand it and repeat it more than a normal sentences. What has power in CI? Images. Images naturally have more power than abstract ideas. A dog with a square head is more interesting, somehow, than
Michele found this blog from a year ago. One paragraph reveals that I was out of L2 probably 40% or more of the time, and only this year on Diana’s challenge to all of us in DPS was in 90% or more of the time. I finally made the switch after nine years. How many
This is a recent comment by Jim that I am making into a blog so that I can add it to a new category on the right of this page called “Beginning the Year”. There is a lot that could go in there, but those posts are just too hard to access now. One good
Michele and I were talking about what to do next year and here are some of her resolutions with my responses italicized. I think that there are more in another email she sent me and Michele you can add them as a comment if you find them. I think it is good for us to know what we intend
We’re not just talking about a teaching method here, folks. We are talking about employment in a crumbling economy. Those of us who chose to go into the profession did so thinking that we could earn a living from it. But, if the method we use fails us, and our enrollments keep dwindling, and no
Hi Ben, I had an amazing experience today. Our school is doing professional learning communities, starting classes late twice a week so we can work in groups. Patty, Rachel and I had to present this morning on our work in the foreign language department. We told them a little bit about CI-based instruction and I
I got an email from a colleague today. It describes the game of Gotcha! that some teachers put on their kids, as in, “Your work is to memorize lists and verbs – you must do your work at home! – and I’m not really going to speak the language in class or do any meaningful (i.e.
I didn’t want to waste any time nickel and diming my students on their final exam this year. So I took a four page embedded reading from a recent story, with approximately 50% new material in it, and, during the first fifty minutes of the 70 minute final exam, we talked around the twenty true/false questions
