In 2009-2010 Annick Chen at Lincoln High School was asked by her administrative team, along with every teacher in the building, to make writing the focal point for that year. Ever dutiful, but knowing full well how people acquire languages, Annick boosted the amount of writing her students did significantly. Their writing scores went down […]
Don Read shares some thoughts from the Agen conference: First, what a great conference and what a great time I had in Agen! Thank you for organizing this very special opportunity! Second, below are a few of the gems that jumped out at me (from among the many great ideas and resources presented): From Sabrina
We can just relax when it comes time to teach an actual class, after studying so hard about this stuff. It’s time to get TPRS out of our minds and into our bodies. Just get a verb from CWB or from a story script or from wherever. (I did some CWB today and it still
Does anyone know what works well for the Bleater Job in a Spanish classroom?
I don’t think our idea of working together to identify a verb sequence that we wanted to teach – common planning on line – can work. Melissa and I were thinking about it but here is my thinking on it now, sixth months later: we each know what we want to teach, what our students’
Ruth explains how we can access Creative Commons to use with Power Point and thus avoid using copyrighted materials when making vPQA slide presentations. She explains: Here is the search page from the Creative Commons website: https://search.creativecommons.org/?q= To find it from the main page, you scroll down a bit to where is says “Find CC
Here is Sean’s suggestion about use of instructional time in a block class. It really is a very useful template, including all of the things one would want to do to keep the brain engaged during a block class. If anyone has anything to add, pls. do so below in the comment fields: By the
Here is a conversation from 2012 with a PLC member who was completely new to comprehension based instruction. It will help us to review some basics about PQA as we crank up the engines again. Hi Ben, Two weeks into the new year and I’d say on a scale of 1-10 I’m at about a 5 or 6.
Chill I know that you and Ruth and Bryan and Craig – a few others as well – have been thinking about vPQA and how to rescue it into some kind of form that we can use as a community here this year. Here are my own thoughts on it at this point. Maybe we
Everything listed here is just a suggestion: To start the year, we can ask ourselves if we have addressed these (optional) things: 1. Wall Posters (see Resources/Posters on this site for a complete list) including: Word Wall blank big post-its or butcher block paper up, empty, to eventually become a Verb Wall of “acquired” verbs Question Words Classroom
A new article from Krashen. I think it is from Nathaniel, but pls. correct me if necessary: Does Duolingo “Trump” University-Level Language Learning? Stephen Krashen March, 2013 Duolingo is a web-based self-paced language teaching program that guides students step-by-step through a sequence of tasks, largely based on translation. It is clearly aimed at conscious learning, although
