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Here is the first of Eric’s two posts to the ACTFL listserve: 2 Questions: In the ACTFL 21st Century Skills Map (p.4) it says this about Today: “Use of thematic units and authentic resources.” ACTFL promotes thematic instruction and authentic resources to be used for instruction and for assessment. I want to know: Why? 1) […]

Eric Herman has recently taken part in a discussion on the ACTFL listserve. Eric made the point against thematic unit grouping of vocabulary to teach languages. To avoid an overly lengthy article here I will publish both of those posts after this one as “Thematic Units – 2” and “Thematic Units – 3”. After making

Here is the link for those who want to watch some video of VanPatten: learninglanguages.celta.msu.edu/sla-vanpatten I also include a few points Eric made here as comments after asking Krashen about VanPatten: One thing I don’t understand is how come VanPatten and Krashen don’t seem to mention each other in their research. Krashen did write this

http://skrashen.blogspot.hk/2014/10/language-acquisition-without-speaking.html Christy Lao and Stephen Krashen Journal of Research of Bilingual Educaiton Research and Instruction 16(1): 215-221. 2014.

Dear Ben, This is just to share how nice was to work with Anne Matava’s scripts. I have been battling for a month in this ‘hard core’ secondary school with plenty of bad boys and girls, constrained by a very narrow curriculum involving study of at least three different tenses and tons of not frequent

Diane suggested publishing the following comment by Eric as an article to make it accessible in the jGR category. It’s an idea we’ve seen before, where the students self reflect on the level of engagement they brought to the class that day by answering questions about how they observed the most important of the Three

This report from Lori asks for some ideas from the group: Hi Ben, I haven’t asked you to reach out to the community in awhile, but since I’m finally exiting the “frantic” period with TCI (I’m in my third year now) I have time to share some exciting news! Would love to hear what the

This is an updated version of an older article: Thinking about how we push-push-push ourselves too hard to get big results using CI,  it occurred to me how really nutty we are when we try to get our kids up to a level of relative fluency in four years (450-500 hours). That’s so nutty. We need

Lynette St. George (Lang) is the WL dep’t chair at Valor Christian High in Highlands Ranch, CO (south suburban Denver). Valor is our own Diane Neubauer’s new school as well. (Like Sabrina, Lynette and Diane are both from Chicago.) So today I rode my bike over there and spent a very nice hour and a

Looking back, I often wonder why the method, almost 25 years old now, hasn’t taken off in our schools, since it arguably still remains out of at least 99% of our classrooms in any effective way. Here are the five biggest reasons for this failure, ranked in order, in my opinion: 1. Lack of persistence

I just deleted my entire inbox, so if you have sent me something to attend to, it’s gone. I did it on purpose, because my inbox had become unmanageable, so it was necessary. I’m not alone on this, by the way. It has been claimed that Thomas De Quincey once lived in an apartment so

jGR is a way of observing certain non-verbal observable behaviors in our students that align with the national standards, in particular the ACTFL Three Modes of Communication, and in particular among the three modes, the listening skill. The term “observable non-verbal behaviors” was invented by Barbara Vallejos of Abraham Lincoln High School in Denver, Colorado