With stories, teaching a language successfully is very difficult, but it reaches most students. Without stories, success is virtually impossible, and reaches only a few bright kids. You have to pick one of these. If you pick the first, you align with 21st century standards. If you pick the second, you align with nothing. You do, however, […]

The effects of the textbook and worksheet on language instruction in our country has been devastating. ACTFL has allowed it, never jabbing their fingers animatedly in the direction of the research. They should have done that. The result is that all teachers who have trusted ACTFL to guide them in the direction of best practices

Note: I write long posts. Social media experts say not to. But this isn’t social media. These pages represent  an in-depth look at our profession on many levels. So I feel no desire to keep my posts short. That said, here’s another long post. It covers a problem that is unique to CI teachers. What

Brett Chonko wrote something about gesturing here a few years ago that is just spot on, in my opinion: I am for the most part convinced in this article to not require my students to gesture next year for a number of reasons: 1. It wasted a lot of time to have kids come up

A truth that all teachers know is that students see through everything. If they sense that we are trying too hard for their approval, then their approval will always remain just out of reach. If, on the other hand, the class is working together to create a story based on their characters, we find that

We feel overwhelmed. Our students feel overwhelmed. Instead of allowing ourselves and our students to feel that way, we should question what make us feel that way. Feeling overwhelmed cannot possibly be a normal human condition, the way we were meant to be. We have bought into the idea that if we don’t feel overwhelmed

Each of us must become our own best teacher, the one that now lies still dormant inside of us, the one waiting to be brought to the real teaching life, to the smiling life, to the happy kids life, with comprehensible input. Nobody else can become what each of us is becoming in this process

Greg shares his syllabus and parent letter: This is my “syllabus”. In my school we call it a “procedure sheet”. Unlike college syllabi, we are not required to provide the whole schedule of what we are going to do in class to students.Here it ishttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1QukizIKwoNKTsklzkTCDCFVW-0PR_7FqFz-0JH8AAkU/edit?usp=sharingReply This is the letter I send home to parents on

If you read the first article on Paul Sandrock, you know that Paul is doing what all good politicians do, speak to their base. In that article, Paul clearly defends both positions. That is his right, maybe. I wonder if it really is his right to defend the traditional way of teaching for two reasons:

Sandrock is the ACTFL Director of Education. In 2014 we in this PLC had a vigorous interchange with his massive ACTFL Foreign Lang. Educators group. We illustrated and defended CI and made the point over a month long interchange that CI is the way people acquire languages, and that the traditional methods of the ACTFL

Before teaching greetings in the fall, consider the content of these posts from recent years here: https://benslavic.com/blog/?s=teaching+greetings

A teacher asked me what kind of auditory input materials I would recommend for aiding in developing her own command of Spanish. I responded: Maybe some of Carol Gaab’s upper level books that she sells for reading classes from her “Fluency Matters” website – the ones with the audio track of the book so you