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I got a question: “Hi Ben, I am preparing some documents that support CI teaching to show my administrators. I looked through the blog and found some great articles but was wondering if there is a list of research based links/articles that blog members have access to. I am building a case to defend CI […]

A teacher contacted me awhile back. She had been attacked about using CI from a team leader. I told her to get some research from Eric Herman. Eric shared this: …I’m dealing with the same ignorance in my district. Your idea to keep it about research sounds logical, but these people are not logical. They

We don’t need any more research. In academia that would be a frivolous comment, but as a classroom teacher in languages I support it. Yes, perhaps we need more research in other fields. No in languages; we already have enough research, at least for the foreseeable future. What we need to do is IMPLEMENT the

1.  16% of WL teachers leave the profession after their first year. 2.  47% of WL teachers have left the profession by the end of their second year. 3.  62% of WL teachers have left the profession by the end of their fourth year. 4.  86% of WL teachers have left the profession by the

How odd that the power of the old guard and their influence on administrators, in the face of the actual research, is enough to keep teachers down, in a defensive posture, on their toes. The teachers are only trying their best in a failed system to employ comprehensible input in their classes. In the movie

Q. What does one do without the support of one’s colleagues when trying to make the change to comprehensible input based instruction? How does one react to a colleague who does not wish to implement a non-textbook approach within the same year grouping? How does one go about using CI to teach older students who

In my opinion, one reason that kids don’t engage in our comprehensible input classes is that we don’t engage them. We get going too fast. We don’t invite them into the proceedings. We make it difficult for them. Maybe we get nervous about the method because we just haven’t got the experience we need with

A CI teacher has again locked horns with a parent simply because he uses best practices in foreign language instruction. Are there any CI teachers who have NOT had to deal with confrontations like this? James’ mother starts off her email to the teacher with: Bonjour, I wanted to follow up a bit to gain

Every now and then we get challenged by misguided and misinformed parents. They are often mean-spirited as well, especially when they feel that their child is not happy in our class. Their children are usually heavily robotic memorizers with not much in their social skills bank accounts. It must be our fault! Why don’t we

Example 2: Nathaniel Hardt once received this letter from a parent. It is typical of the kind of letter teachers sometimes receive from parents who expect our comprehensible input-based classes to resemble other classes, with lots of memorization and homework, which they decidedly do not for the simple reason that in our work we have

I got this question from Michelle in Australia: Q. I really struggle to match the effortless way you stay in L2 and I feel like I’m not giving enough CI. A. Your point here is a valid concern, of course, but not if you think about it in terms of how much time it takes

Please find below an extensive discussion about grading when using either the Middle School Square or the High School Star. You’ll need coffee, since this may be the single longest blog post I’ve shared, and I’ve been sharing these posts since 2004.  This information is the result of 40 years of intense personal introspection and