Doug Stone has written admirably on the assessment and curriculum development pieces as they relate to input based methods. We really need to keep in the forefront of this blog the discussion about data, especially. Wwe really need to be careful. Data can carry a lot of misinformation. It is not easy to understand and even […]
Sometimes I blend structures from Anne’s stories. Like I took se sent comme/feels like from Wendy Goes To A Psychiatrist and took seul/lonely from Lene and pulled mignon/cute from the text of Lene (Anne had not targeted it but I wanted my kids to know it) so my new structures were feels lonely and cute and, combining the two
John Keats, in his Letter to John Taylor, 27th Febrary 1818, stated: …if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all…. This line expresses how I feel about language learning. What we do in instructing our students should not be a primarily conscious thing, no
Bryce requests that we read and discuss the text below: Here is an attendance and make-up work policy I am preparing now to deal with absences next school year. Progress in CI-based classes depends upon regular student attendance. Only students that show up can get the input. I have to begin writing at this time
I just gave my second final exam to a mixed group (levels 2-5). I stole the idea from a traditional teacher in our building. The concept was that the kids were returning ten years after having graduated to the Russian class reunion. They had to have 15 pictures that they would share with classmates. They
[ed. note: I met Doug Stone in San Antonio last year. He is in the L.A. area and has worked with Blaine, Robert, and others to retool his teaching as per input based methods. He recently sent me a few emails that are quite powerful statements. They reflect a ton of hard work over the past year] First
Some teachers speak English as much as 90% of the time, others as little as 10% of the time. But sometimes, oddly, on year end assessments, students from the second teacher’s class – the kids who rarely hear the language in class – often show gains that are not too far away from those of the teacher whose
In the past people have mentioned the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie as a good way to learn how to relate to the students. I know that this has worked for me in tremendous ways. But I think that the book can also be used to work with our
Thomas Young – Dealing with Opposition in Teaching Read More »
[ed. note: stories from Anne are always reproduced here with her permission. This one is designed for upper levels]: lonely pat that hurts Lene is lonely. She wants a pet. She goes to the Humane Society and sees a cute little ferret. “Awww! Isn’t that cute! May I pat it?” she asks the employee. “Of
So many of the recent comments here should really be blogs so that they can be categorized. Oh well. At least I can trap this gem by Laurie on output into the new “output” category on the right here. (However, since I can’t keep up with the categorization process, I would suggest just using the search function most
Today a kid had a head down. Red flag. I was either going too fast, or going too wide into new vocabulary that was not part of my lesson’s objective, or maybe both. I was also possibly not checking for meaning often enough. And I probably wasn’t putting enough air between chunks of sound. So, if I
I want to start from the bottom of my list. The enormous chasm between low-achieving students and teachers who fail to reach them starts here. “Students who do not invest themselves in school work are making an irrevocably bad decision and should be blamed for their own failures.” This is something that most teachers accept
