I’m beginning to see more and more that one of the biggest enemies we face in this work are the very schools in which we do the work. The CI birds wings are just too massive for too many of the admins working in our buildings these days. These admins are ignorant of the research […]

Below is an example of what Carly does with the rather useless and clumsy daily objectives requirement that is another way admins have of keeping control over us. In her school, she is required to write them in a specific format: I can _______ by/in order to__________. Carly explains: I also think it is unnatural

Q. We are going to have to start to have learning targets each day/week and the kids are going to have forms to fill out explaining how they have reached that learning target. I need to figure out how to handle that with this way of teaching. Here is one possible answer to this question:

I got this email question with my response below: Q. [On the topic of creating a CI based curriculum]…I just sat down and asked myself what students would need in Level I if we were just concentrating on them.  So I came up with the personal interview questions online, and from there, wrote a list

It took us 15 years here, but in the past year we have finally articulated our major concern in this work. It is our mental health, which in turn is influenced of course by how we teach and how we manage our classrooms. Specifically, if the method we use allows for much greater levels of

Krashen and Lev Vygotsky fifty years before him have shown that the concept of being a valued member of a community (which leads to feelings in the language learner of self-worth and confidence) play major roles in language acquisition. So before we get too technical in our discussion of what a curriculum is, let’s ask

Warning: this is kind of a long rant – if you read the contents of the link as well. Just more grist for the mill: We have had, over all the years, many questions about curriculum. The ones we’ve developed here as a group always seem to get outdated, buried back in the archives, scrolled

When we give our students a reason to be happy in our classrooms, instead of placing them somewhere on an arbitrary scale of how “good” they are at the language compared to other students, we do it right. We place the needs of children to be an accepted part of a vibrant language sharing community

When teachers don’t assess their students, even if doing so diminishes the amount of instructional time available to the students, administrators are not happy. Indeed, assessment seems to be the major goal of education, even though in languages it is nearly impossible to find out how much language has been acquired in the soup of

Points to make clear to the quiz writer regarding her job: She is to provide 12 questions for a 10-point quiz –or 6 questions for a 5-point quiz – in case one or two of the questions “don’t work”.  During the Create phase, the quiz writer works closely with the storywriter to keep facts straight.

What would a quick quiz on the content of the Henry tableau look like? Below is an example. Notice how easy the questions are to answer.The quiz is written, obviously, in English. You translate the questions into the target language when you ask them.  Possible questions from our text for the quiz: Does Henry play

The best way to find articles here (as of today there are 8,000 articles and 56,000 comments going back to 2004) is to use the search bar. So if you’re trying to track down any topic that may come up during your teaching week, use that first and check in the categories second. It’s more