Alisa adds a few most profound thoughts about how we are doing this work: Many of us can’t teach all day, pouring all we’ve got into relationships with kids, and then fight all night justifying what we’re doing to ignorant or close-minded bosses… But I think in the short time that I’ve been involved with […]
This from our Alisa is the best way to look at data collection and admin requests that I have yet seen, and we have hundreds of articles on this topic here on the PLC.  This is the way to do it: The more we can assuage teacher and admin anxiety, by providing documentation: rubrics, can-do’s
We are nervous because, though we hope for the best, though we know that at times our skills and training allow us to hit the stories out of the park, we are always fearing the worst — stories that fall flat, that do not engage our students, that leave us wishing for a way to deliver
In non-targeted work, we are freer to think in terms of activities and topics, and not worry so much about finding that Perfect Activity to Teach Colors.  We thus can give up the pressure to tightly control the flow of language, and let the students’ interests truly serve as the sole criterion for the content
Just as every student can acquire a language by hearing and understanding messages, every teacher can learn to speak slowly and understandably to convey compelling messages.  But expecting students to gain control of targeted structures on our imposed timeline does not honor their natural ability to acquire.  Neither is it in accordance with Dr. Krashen’s
To my understand as well as Tina’s, delivering compelling messages in a relaxed community is all Dr. Krashen is recommending. The two of us have talked about this topic non-stop for over a year now.  Krashen says nothing about repetitions, targets, heavy circling, establishing meaning (not necessary if we are teaching slowly enough and the context
Natural speech using language that emerges from the need for communication allows us to focus more completely on students’ ideas. This has built incredible community and student engagement in our classrooms. When getting repetitions of targeted language is the focus in the classroom, the language is not allowed to do its natural job of expressing
Just focusing on delivering comprehensible messages to our students helps us ease into a state of flow in our classes. Â Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests in his Forgetting Hypothesis that students should forget that they are listening to messages in another language. Â This forgetting that the messages are in another language clears a path for the
Just focusing on delivering comprehensible messages to our students helps us ease into a state of flow in our classes. Â Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests in his Forgetting Hypothesis that students should forget that they are listening to messages in another language. Â This forgetting that the messages are in another language clears a path for the
Our goal is to make acquisition effortless for them. Thus, if the sentence is: Jacob was born on Sept. 29, 2006. Walk to Jacob. Â Touch him on the shoulder. Â Smile big. Â Say his name. Â If no one in the world is proud of Jacob, someone is now. Â Next, walk back over to where it says
We become adept at becoming aware of what we are feeling intuitively as teachers. We learn to feel our way creatively and expansively through a class without a lesson plan. We learn that good language teaching is not all about teaching a certain thing at a certain time, but rather just spending time with the kids
Have the researchers figured out how many combinations of words there are in languages? Have they figured out the form it assumes in human speech? Can they predict the form that language assumes? I’m thinking not. I don’t see how they could, anyway. There are too many combinations. So my opinion of language is that
