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Here is the link to today’s 5:00 p.m. Teacher’s Discovery webinar on online CI instruction: https://www.facebook.com/events/717709192298591/

This further explains some of the content of my webinar tomorrow: Rationale: If you are going to be successful in the fall with your online language instruction, you’re going to have to get your kids focused on the message and not on the language when you use the ZOOM platform. Despite your frustrations this spring

I’m doing a Facebook webinar for Teacher’s Discovery tomorrow, at 5:00 pm Eastern Time.  Here’s the information: https://www.facebook.com/events/717709192298591/ Also earlier that day at 2:00 pm Eastern Time is our usual Zoom class on the Invisibles. We’re almost ready to go on to Category B! Anyone wanting in, let me know.

I will continuously fight against targeted CI instruction. It’s so sad that most CI teachers don’t even really know the difference. They think that targeting is what CI is. But it’s not. It’s an aberration and it’s costing them student engagement. When I said in the last article here that the novels and any targeted

The COVID crisis may be what we need to free TPRS and the entire CI movement from its self-imposed limits. What limits? Krashen has made it very clear that when you try to use comprehensible input to teach word lists, verb lists, thematic unit lists, semantic set lists, lists of words from chapter books (i.e.

The creativity that we see in the silent-era films of Buster Keaton is off the chart. But there is a reason for that – Keaton’s philosophy of making a film (and this in my view is an excellent philosophy for CI teachers to adapt) is that “the middle will take care of itself”. What does

Once in a workshop in Los Angeles, a teacher mentioned the UCLA researcher Earl Stevick (1923-2013). She said that Stevick was one of Dr. Krashen’s early mentors. The context of the conversation that day during our workshop was about how circling is not needed when using the Invisibles/emergent language because the new language tends to

I have noticed over the years that there are two ways that students look at me in class. When I am using English they seem far away. They seem to be considering what I’m saying but not really caring very much about it. I guess they hear enough English. But when I’m talking slowly in

[Note: I repost this article often, almost once a month, for any new readers here, and also because I keep adding to it. If you are willing to read all 53 of the reasons I oppose targeted comprehensible input, you might possibly find yourself echoing the a statement about classroom management by Fred Jones: “…open

Category A lends itself to your making a beautiful word flower in the first 20 minutes of class. For example, in the Henry card talk tableau vivant creation process in Phase 1 of the star sequence, the petals of that flower are made up of: Henry…plays violin…with a giant…in Canada… at 5:00 a.m….in the morning.

Craig has been using the Invisibles for three years. He shares: I like to use the idea of the Star Sequence when making observations with the class about a person or a place. In which case, the “create” is actually creating a narrative that details our observations about a thing or the life story of a

If a person gets to live 80 years on planet Earth, that’s 29,200 days. We would have to subtract a lot of those if a kid painfully goes through 12 years of homework-based education while growing up. Do we really want to force kids to do something they don’t want, when they only get 29,000