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We need to address HOW we are making our kids feel when they are in our classes. To extend Marshall McCluhan’s message beyond electronic media, is it not possible that we ourselves, our bodies and the expressions on our faces, also the medium for our CI messages in our classes? Bear in mind that the […]

This is a repost from 2018: There has been a lot of recent discussion in the World Language teaching community about performance assessments that ask students to interact with authentic resources and integrate all three ACTFL modes of communication – interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational. This movement towards asking student to interact with the language in

This morning I was doing my usual a.m. routine of sitting at the kitchen table answering emails, the usual. My eye caught the mess on the sink and countertops of my kitchen and my brain said, “Clean the fucking kitchen!”. But my other eye caught on my computer’s desktop the image Danielle drew in our

A repost from 2011: We want to be like pitching machines, which, being robotic, do not overly concern themselves with the ideas part/where the story goes. It’s like a director deciding to develop the dialogue for a film around the personality of an actor (the class) and not on a script connected to targets (the “curriculum”). There

Focus on the beauty of the language, and not on what your students can or cannot do with it. Beauty always draws people in. So does fun. It also draws people in. Beauty and fun – don’t teach another class without them.

I feel as if the “New CI” out there is very much about making money for the new breed of purveyors of CI, who explore and pollute the purity of the research in what has become a new CI marketplace that uses social media and the internet to sell very mediocre stuff that has strayed

This was written and posted here in 2016:  Are Sauk, Latin, Myskoke, Chickasaw languages asleep or is there something more going on? It’s easy to say they’re dead or on the point of extinction (in five years 70 of the remaining 139 Native American languages will “disappear”). But are they really going to be dead?

There are teachers who earn their paychecks with an almost complete disregard for what is going on in their students’ lives, and who see their young charges as nothing more than incapable annoyances who could never compete with their five star students, those who take over the classroom and thus divide the class, labeling the

This is from my Category A book: The approach described herein involves no planning. This involves no planning of instruction and no planning of assessment as well – no preparation of tests and no grading of tests, or almost none. First, we have students writing the quizzes during class. Our use of the Interpersonal Skill

The old type of language teacher mostly only taught in ways that allowed privileged kids, usually white ones, to get into their AP classes. You know the type of teacher I mean. Other kids who “weren’t that smart” weren’t allowed into their upper level classes. But the research shows clearly that all students, regardless of

If online language instruction fails, people will lose their jobs, because they cannot deliver the product being sought by the customer. I wonder how many of us have thought about that. Are we indeed so entitled that we think we will retain our jobs after this crisis even if we don’t maintain order in and

Anyone into conspiracy theories will enjoy this post. It raises questions about whether Krashen’s work is original. It also completely supports my NTCI concept vs. “targeted” CI. This entry is from 2007. One of my middle school students – “K”  – wrote 21 posts here in 2006 (back when it was just “the blog”) about