Many of us had the honor of meeting some the members of the Turkish military language teachers in Denver and Chicago last summer. This report is from Yasar Karum: Hi Ben, So far we have given fifty hours of English instruction. We have done TPR and listening activities through textbooks (Before Book One, Listen First). […]
And here is another report from Yasar’s colleague Osman: Hi Ben, This is Osman from Turkey. Last July I attended the NTPRS conference in Lisle, IL. Everything about TPRS method was going okay until the first day I attended your unscheduled evening TPRS sessions with other TPRS experts. To me, those sessions were much more
John has a question for the group that some of us may be able to relate to: My question for the group is, what do you do when you are faced with an ugly class? I can’t think of any other word to describe this class, except ugly. It’s ugly in there almost every day.
I shared this article outlining a possible approach to presenting to school WL departments about six weeks ago here. Since then it occurred to me that if anyone is going to use any part of it they might also benefit from sending out my book Stepping Stones to Stories to the department you are working
Here is the link from jen that I kept in the queue over recent weeks, delayed because we were having our little “tea time” with the ACTFL group members. It fits very well with Laurie’s comment here last nite about how our intent to show kids that they matter should be our guiding principle as
We have discussed the very important issue of teaching small groups of kids in smaller classes or in home school settings using comprehensible input but we don’t have a category on it for ease of reference. Today I am adding two new categories to meet this need: one called Home School and another called Small
Let’s not mince words. Kids of today have few reasons to believe in themselves. The scene in most schools is still all about competition and testing and dominating and winning and excluding others. But if we learn to teach using comprehensible input we can change that culture of competition into one of cooperation and mutual
Here is an old blog post from 2008: There is a line in either Baudelaire or St.-Exupéry, I can’t remember which, in which the writer is talking about some guy who thought that he could get somewhere by “voie de terre”, by land, not realizing that his destination was an island. I’ll have to track that
If you need a little chuckle this morning here’s one. My favorite is the advertisement in the third paragraph. Unless, of course, you think that by filling out their survey something will happen. I don’t: Dear Colleague, ACTFL will soon be launching a sixteen month initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to
A repost from last spring: We accept classroom stress as normal, in spite of the fact that we have now found a way to teach that is not inherently stressful. Yes, the great fact about comprehension based teaching is that its nature is to be almost devoid of stress. It is the atmosphere of striving
Celebration is in order for one of our group members. Bob Patrick got a write up in the Atlanta Constitution! Here’s the link: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/making-the-grade-latin-teacher-makes-language-leap/nhzCz/
Robert made the effort to actually purchase and read the Content-Based Teaching and Learning book, so the least we can do is read this post slowly and reflect on what he says: When we start talking about method, approach, strategy, etc., we quickly get into a quagmire of conflicting definitions and opinions with often little
