Michael shares with us the results of that meeting he had last week. The point he makes is that when discussing the use of comprehensible input with people/colleagues who quite simply don’t want to hear our positions, we should not try to convince them. Instead, we need to learn to play a broken record for […]
I would like to poll the group on the question of translation back into written, not spoken, L1 in our vPQA slide presentations. What do people think? Julie has no L1 translation on her vPQA slides. I wrote to Andrew: …I don’t know how I feel about the translation. I’m like 55% for it and
This is from Ben Lev out there in CA: At the community college we are considering a change of textbook. It’s a crazy thing, but maybe someone has a least-worst textbook to suggest? We currently use Vistas (like Descubre). We’ve seen Dicho y Hecho, and we’ll see Pearson. Is there a “better” series that comes
Power of Circling Alisa Shapiro has said: “Circling incorporates all the other language embedded in the question, and helps gets those pieces/chunks acquired, too. This is particularly critical for novice/beginners. The circled questions include all kinds of morphology and syntax, plus students get tons of modeling of the phonetic system. The implicit instruction that gets
Craig West has re-affirmed my faith in mankind with this comment: Hey Ben have you heard of http://www.haikudeck.com? It’s a super easy way to build visual presentations with open source images so no royalties to worry about. It takes lots of steps out of building a presentation as well I think it would be a
So if you are willing to put a vPQA slide presentation into the data base, please send it to me at benslavic@yahoo.com in the form of a Power Point attachment. It can’t be a google doc. If it’s in PPT form I can upload it here as I have with a few tonight. When you
Circling Using Emotions Sometimes I repeat the same exact circled question three or four times in a row using different emotions. One would think that this would bore the kids, but the kids can be fooled into focusing on the same sentence multiple times by my asking them questions in different ways using differently voiced
Sister Rose Marie is still in need of finding Spanish instruction using CI in the Los Angeles area. Please contact her at the number below if you have any ideas: Dear Ben: Can you help me? I need to learn Spanish in a right brain TPRS approach. So I can better work and serve among
In a comment about the Wellesley, Massachusetts FL program, Nathaniel Hardt reports that they weigh grades in the following way: Term 1: 10% Term 2: 18% Term 3: 25% Term 4: 31% (Final Exam: 16%) I find this brilliant. It helps in two ways: 1. It gives kids time to figure out this brand new
Hola, Ben! I feel like I’ve fallen off the face of the earth in the last few months. School and life have both been crazy busy, and I haven’t been able to check in with the PLC as often as I used to. My students lost two weeks of classes in the month of February
It was last year about this time that we really got into using Look and Discuss as a group. The three links at the bottom of this article are from March and April of last year and I think that Look and Discuss is a great option for us now in spring as we need
Circling Sends Messages By starting the first class of the year in the target language using circling, I send many messages to my students: 1. By slowly circling all the time in class, I send the message that slow circling will be the norm in my classroom all year. I also send the message that
