I worked myself into a frazzle for twenty four years in South Carolina before moving to a middle school in Colorado where, thanks to Susan Gross and Blaine Ray, I found the treasure of comprehensible input instruction (then in the form of TPRS) that instantly brought me a relative degree of joy in teaching. Back […]
A repost: Our national parent organization, ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) says on their website that “the ability to communicate with respect and cultural understanding in more than one language is an essential element of global competence.” It may be true – global competence may be a worthy goal, but
It is the very lack of ACTFL’s providing teachers with ways to implement a curriculum that leads to the building of community – real human communication – in my classroom that caused me, over many years of teaching, to feel somewhat crazy all the time. I wanted to communicate with my kids instead of just
Our national parent organization, ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) says on their website that “the ability to communicate with respect and cultural understanding in more than one language is an essential element of global competence.” It may be true – global competence may be a worthy goal – but doesn’t
If a child feels that they are a valued member of a classroom community, they will acquire the language. But many kids haven’t the slightest idea what being in a classroom community even means. It is due to the fallout from being in schools, where building classroom communities can’t compete with the teacher’s need to
How to speak to our students in a way that uplifts? It’s so simple. First, we must of course speak so slowly to them that they understand effortlessly (Krashen). We know we are doing this when it is painful for us to speak that slowly – because when we speak so slowly that it is
How to build up damaged kids so that they are happy members of our classroom communities? How to make our students want to be in our classes and slowly, via trust in us and in the way we are teaching them and in their peers, become productive members of our class community? The strategies –
A repost: Sean Lawler wrote recently that we all have our moments where we speak in English at length about whatever comes up that is just too interesting to not talk about in English. I think this helps with the long block, especially for the older kids. Here’s an example English tirade we went on:
Clearly, the case being made here is that shame plays a major role in preventing real communities from forming in our classrooms. What to do about it? In my view, the best way to neutralize the effects of shame in our classrooms is to offer a superior, feel-good and strongly inclusive community building curriculum (see
I got the message below from a teacher whose employers think that the standards are connected to all four of the four skills at all levels. That thinking is not in touch with the research about how people acquire languages. If you want to educate yourself about the term Standards Based Grading search in the
What kind of shame do our kids experience that prevent community from happening in our classrooms? (1) Testing shame is a big one. High stake testing starts in elementary school, which is outrageous, and it is this testing that by high school is so out of control that it represents perhaps the biggest impediment to
The isolation that we see in some students plays a tremendous role in preventing them from making strong and observable gains in the language. Therefore, a focus on building community is just as important as one on comprehensible input when developing best practices in our field. In my opinion comprehensible input and building community are
