I don’t know if you heard about the Spanish teacher in a school in New York who gave the students worksheets with racist/pro-White sentences to translate. It’s a disaster, but the article missed the fact that the very fact of giving students worksheets in the first place is a disaster. Not that that’s something that […]
I know that things are confusing about accessing old posts and I’m working on that. It should be straightened out soon. Meanwhile, here is an article from 2015 that addresses the equity piece (which is the book I’m currently working on due out in the fall). I included the comments made on the original post,
High school language departments usually anoint themselves as judge and jury of the middle school teachers who feed them their students. Their message is and always has been that if rising ninth graders show up at their doors “unprepared” to do the grammar work in their freshman year (they seem to be most concerned
Most language teachers who check out CI end up finding something wrong with it. But if the best research we have on language acquisition points to CI as the way people learn languages, then what are they finding wrong? They are probably finding things out about CI that they don’t like. They are also probably
In a comment tonight, Denise asked about the Self-Study Course. I thought I would answer that here as a post so that others can know about it. Denise, by the way, is an advanced Ultimate CI teacher who has taken the Zoom trainings on both books and has become adept at the approach. She has
The visual activity of reading activates the visual cortex in the back of the brain. Currently in the CI movement, reading is done far too much in level 1 classes, with the result that CI is floundering. It is because the way the brain functions to acquire language depends on huge amounts of auditory input
I wrote this to Sean today in the comments section but it is of sufficient importance to repeat here: Sean what you say about reading here is of immense importance. Years ago I suggested to my colleagues here in DPS that those novels HAVE TO GO, and since there have been and still are people
Most language teachers continue to think quite naively that if their students can translate some words in the target language into English, or spell a verb, then they know the language. But what they do they actually know, having memorized such lists? Students who memorize lists of words or verb conjugations and everything connected to
Today I got this introductory letter from Peter McHugh, one of the patrons here, and I would like to share it so all of us in this group can keep getting to know each other. (Actually Peter, like Sean, has been in the PLC for many many years and has migrated here and this migration,
I’ve done five podcasts so far. I think they are pretty good. They mainly discuss the importance of community-building and the equity piece in CI classrooms. In later podcasts I will address other general topics related to CI, as opposed to the specifics of how to make CI work in our classrooms, which are already
It was reported yesterday that the University of Memphis is now offering faculty $3K for ‘infusing’ equity, social justice into their curriculums. Other schools mentioned in the Yahoo! News article are the University of Nebraska and the University of Arkansas. Hmmm. That’s not a bad deal! $3K for teaching in accordance with the research as
