The Director of Education of ACTFL, with whom we have tangled before, has recently written the text below. Thanks to Alisa Shapiro for sending it to us. Note the hefty list of references. Hmmm. Who are those people? What are their credentials? How do they teach? Do they teach to the few or to the […]
My principal was coming in to my classroom last year for a required unannounced observation. Beforehand, she asked me how she could be of help, what to look for. I responded: Hi Beth – I thought of something for you to look for when you come in. Look and see what the kids are focused on.
Here is another thing Tina said in our conversation last weekend: …now the introverts in the class feel very safe doing stories with the Invisibles because I don’t “make them participate” anymore. What I am seeing in my classes is introverts running the class and defying in their own quiet way the power of the
Craig reports from Los Angeles: Well I was totally demoralized before thanksgiving break. We had just started a new trimester and they had given me a mixture of students who had taken my class and failed it, taken it and passed it, native speakers, and novices all in the same class of like 17 kids.
Here is something else worth sharing from when I talked to Tina last weekend: I have recently found out that my students will trust me, that they can learn to trust me to bring the fun in a calm and consistent way, if I just ask them simple questions and not get all like a
Why are people advising that we all do this work in the same way? What we do with comprehensible input is our choice. Some like story asking. Others like story listening. Others like PQA all the time. Others like to focus on the high road of reading. Others like to describe pictures. Others like to
There is no right way to do this work. We all do what resonates best with our internal teaching artist souls. Why deny what we feel is best for our students because someone said that there is some right way? And how could there even be a “right way” when the putty we have been
Pat Hiller Stainke wrote this on FB. I wrote some of my own responses under them. Pat’s comments are in italics and mine are in regular print: …I’m an idea person, so it’s not hard to change gears or to come up with new stuff – but I feel a sense of urgency about handling
Computers can alter images. They can enhance them or distort them. I believe that by trying to make Krashen’s theories fit into school settings, we have distorted them. We have taken a beautiful face and put a very large forehead on it. That’s probably not what happened. Much good has been done to offer a
Robert wrote this a few weeks ago. I repost it here because it is so important, in case anyone missed it the first time: The comprehensible output (CO) hypothesis states that we acquire language when we attempt to transmit a message but fail and have to try again. Eventually, we arrive at the correct form
Beth McCune wrote on iFLT FB yesterday: Trigger alert: contains musings on untargeted CI. You may want to keep scrolling… Maybe the process of acquiring L2 is a less natural process than acquiring L1 only because we make it so. Many people acquire L2 without any classes. An hour per day of CI is an
From a recent Dilbert comic: Dilbert (to his boss with the two stacks of pointy black hair): “We added a new performance test, but learned that the test itself is flawed. Now our product fails our own tests and our customers are asking to see the test results. Do I have permission to fake the
