God: By now it has become pretty clear to me that You want this all to change. I welcome the change away from favoring only the privileged in American education, of dismissing the masses of kids who don’t “measure up” to the few. That’s not who we are. Not here. Not in these United States. […]
A department chair once gave some grief to a CI teacher bc the CI teacher wasn’t making language learning challenging enough for her students (read: she wasn’t giving enough worksheets). Here is Robert Harrell’s inspiring response to that teacher: I’m sorry to hear you are getting grief from your administrator about rigor. It sounds to
This post should be read by all who think – I’m sorry but in my view incorrectly – that they can blend CI with the textbook: A colleague wrote to the PLC: We have started using the TPRS method this year at school. I am using it for French 1, 2 and 3. I find
Here is a post from 2008: I just need to write this out for myself, so I can see it in writing and read it before each of my classes. It describes the mental preparation I need to consciously do before each class comes in. Luckily, I don’t feel the need to think about circling,
I am meeting more and more teachers online who have thought themselves not very good at language teaching when the real culprit for this lack of confidence can be found in the following article. It’s such a sad thing to see gifted teachers lose their confidence because of the approach used in their buildings and
More Robert Harrell. Ain’t it great? Far too many people hear “use authentic texts” and think “use ONLY authentic texts”. While I cannot speak for ACTFL, I imagine that they are not saying authentic texts only. I do know that the presenter from College Board who led the AP workshop I attended in 2011 did
Marko Sanden wrote this as a comment here on the PLC last week. It contains good insights into the details of online language instruction: “I remind them regularly that my assumption is that they WILL demonstrate interpersonal communication skills and that I’ve already given them those points each class and only they can lose them. For
What if your students don’t want to give any real energy to the interactive activities that we have worked so hard to learn as we have retooled our classrooms over to comprehensible input? What if the kids just act totally disinterested? What do we do then? Bryan offers perhaps the best response I have seen
If you have a copy of this book, please send me the PDF at benslavic@yahoo.com. I can’t find it in my computer. Merci d’avance! (I’ll send you other free books in return.)
A repost: Eric says: If you haven’t seen this talk, then check it out. It’s much of what Krashen and Ravitch have been saying forever! While not being about the FL classroom, I feel it sums up a lot of what we have also been saying on your blog about the US education system. http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Toxic-Culture-of-Education-Joshu;search%3Ajoshua%20katz
Robert has offered some sterling advice on how to deal with administrators: 1. Have a checklist hanging by the door telling all visitors how exactly to observe your comprehensible input classroom. Ask the evaluator(s) to take one the moment they walk into the room. It guides their observation – unless they have a state-mandated checklist
My new website – much changed – will be live soon. I keep saying soon, but there is so much involved in web development, as many of us who have written books for our colleagues know. I do like this new image that my web developer just made:
