Looks like the funding for this study may be there, and TAMU has just approved it, so I’m reposting this. Julia needs just one more volunteer to get this into action. We already have precious few such studies on non-targeted so please if you are willing, contact her: Julia Lynch is a researcher at the

This is from my ANATS book for Loly who is working with dictée in her classes this week: Dictée: This is a powerful metacognitive tool that helps students attempt to match up the sounds of the language with what they can write. Again, we do not get a lot of language gains with this activity,

Alisa and I shared an interesting email thread today. She wrote: Hi Ben, The place where I’m consulting [ed. note: a Hebrew School in NYC] has a very intense testing culture.  As they become schooled in CI, the principal of the junior high, I’m told, is quite stuck on what standard to hold the junior high

Personally, I don’t like the pressure to create a great story in every class. There is the idea out there that the teacher has to walk into the classroom and create with her students a great story, as long as they have the skills. Too much pressure. In that story model, everything, all the interest and

Those who, like me, think that the Star Sequence provides the truest overall curricular form to NTCI might enjoy this suggestion from Alisa: Here is an optional modification to The Star Sequence: Add a 6th point that includes: (1) Small Talk (2) Classroom banter (3) Card Talk (4) National Day and other beginning of class

I just had an insight into the reason these things are on the ACTFL pages. I once worked, an eternity ago, with Vicki Galloway, who was the South Carolina Foreign Language Consultant and later a big shot in the ACTFL hierarchy. Every time I talked to Vicki I could not understand her words. She was

Those six principles/”core practices” – I have to put them in quotes because I can’t take them seriously – that Alisa brought up won’t leave my mind, and hence me, alone, since I am what I think. Kind of. I keep thinking about them. They are just too juicily wrong and out of touch with

Well, the weather just turned cold here in Colorado after five months of perfect mountain weather. It had to happen. I have been going through old files and I found four quotes that might help us deal with another Monday morning in that very strange month in school buildings called October: The first is from

I have been going through old Google docs and found 98 pages of old blog articles from before 2007. Some may want to peruse them. But keep in mind that they are very TPRS oriented and were written way before the NTCI thing happened (2016): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AJFFDTJmEDjbd455DjZHOBS_5MBjJ9NKEWtBvZbySyc/edit

Greg wrote this cool power point on A Natural Approach to Stories, which I think in many ways is an even more important book than A Natural Approach to the Year: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12oBa_3fzgiJuxvPdmpzj8LRxyqGWmJMs8fAxLqXa6tc/edit#slide=id.g2a2aee8035_0_29

Question for anyone in the group on the scripts: Hello Ben, I just purchased the 97 Scripts (Matava) from your website. Thanks for making it available! Question: Do you think it might be a good idea (apart from creating a story with the whole class) to provide students with the script so they can create