I don’t know of any CI activity in Poland. However, we now have a group of five teachers from rural Poland with us, reading the books and hopefully taking part in the discussion here with questions, clarifications, etc. So, we offer from our group a big welcome to Agnieszka, Asia, Kasia, Janina and Aneta. In […]

Jake reports on what has really been quite a remarkable re-entry into teaching after a long segue. I think he has decided well in terms of simplifying his job and of reducing daily stress. Note in particular what he says about planning below: When I sat down over the summer to attack planning for my

A few days ago David wrote about applying CI to upper levels and I gave a response w high levels of snark. But that’s really what I believe based on my own experiences – I do believe that for all but the few gifted kids in the class it’s a fool’s errand to even try

David asked these questions – Hi Ben, Late last year you shared some of your books with me, and as a department we have plunged head-first into NTCI this year.  It’s going well with levels I & II.  But what about pre-AP/Honors/Advanced classes?  How do we transition students from listening exclusively to us, to developing

Any WL department that has switched to 100% NTCI gets my four books on NTCI (A Natural Approach to Stories/ANATS, A Natural Approach to the Year/ANATTY – Year One, the Invisibles, and the Invisibles Supplements) for free, along with free lifetime membership to the PLC.

If you read my older books from 10-15 years ago, they are filled w details about how to make TPRS work. Each year from 1997 or so to 2015, when I finally jumped the TPRS ship, the skills and strategies got more and more complex until they were a real burden. I attribute this to

On the general topic of how stressful our work is, especially now at the beginning of the year when we have so much to deal with, I got an email on Friday from a PLC member whose been reading here for over ten years: Hi Ben – I felt dizzy and lightheaded this morning, it

I have noticed a general tendency on the part of CI teachers to focus too much on output in the first few years. It’s a natural thing to do as a language teacher, because we want to guide our kids along in the ways of writing and speech. But nothing good happens fast. My caution,

Any ideas from anyone on what to do when a teacher is going to be out on the first day?

In the past, teachers were told to do certain things in their classrooms to find out of their students understood them. First, they were told to ask their students via ten finger comprehension checks and/or indicated with thumbs up or thumbs down whether they understood. Neither works. The kids lie. Why? Because they are at

Did anyone get a slight stab of concern in the pit of your stomach when you read the title of this article? Why beat yourself up if you don’t teach perfectly? I went to New Delhi to teach in the American Embassy School after my retirement to learn more about teaching from Linda Li, whom

Here is the response made by our PLC member to this person, for those following that thread: Ben – Here’s my response to each of her concerns and I also sent her 7 pages of research about CI from the Year 1 book if she wanted to read it. Dear _________.   Thank you for your