According to some CI experts, “breakdown” is a concern. Breakdown is when a student answers a question but shows hesitation and the teacher, upon seeing this in the student, says to herself, “we need to practice the sentence more”. But students are there to listen and absorb what they can, not to be taught a […]
This post appeared a few years ago here: There used to be, years ago, an expression that was going around the moretprs list: “Circle of Die!” Now I see that it should be “Circle and Die!” How things have changed! Now some of us are finding that if we circle or favor repetitions over real
For years, people have tried to adapt CI instruction to specialized language instruction, for example to train a group of foreign nurses who need the medical vocabulary before they can start working in the profession. It is impossible. The nurses will not learn the terms they need until the bedrock of their language system is
As a general rule, the most effective stories contain far fewer new ideas and far fewer sentences than most teachers have employed in storytelling in the past. It is highly recommended that teachers limit the amount of new information allowed into the story. It will help everything. Moreover, kids want stories to be short and
Ben Fisher – a member of our PLC – asked this question about reading and my response is below. There is no intent to be contrary in my answer – it’s just the way I think, which always has some bais in the need for equity in American WL classrooms. Here is Ben’s question for
Here is a passage from the introduction to my new book, which is entitled The Invisibles – Towards a New Curriculum in Language Instruction. I post it here to let the group know that after all these years I have finally decided that a language curriculum should be based on images, and not on words and ideas. The difference in starting points implies a vastly different set of – in my opinion and experience – just plain
Hi Ben – I have a girl in my Spanish 1 class who is getting RTI’ed for issue with attention and attendance. Apparently she is one of the most difficult students that teachers are dealing with in her other classes. Yesterday afternoon she came into my room after school and asked to borrow one of
I do apologize for not writing more here recently. I am in the very final stages of working on a new book that is the third in a trilogy, a sequel to A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS) and A Natural Approach to the Year (ANATTY). You can find information about it on my website
About twenty years ago when teaching high school French in South Carolina, being at that point roughly half way through my teaching career, I was struggling very deeply emotionally. I was not happy in my job. The only fun I was having was after school coaching cross country and basketball and track. The early optimistic
Some people still think that the degree to which they can get a good problem going and then coming up with a cute and neatly wrapped solution is an indication of their talent as a CI teacher. Nothing could be further from the truth. The quality of the problem and its solution in a story
Hey Carly and Alisa look what I figured out: I spent fifteen years thinking that I wasn’t good enough at TPRS, innocently going to national conferences and spinning stories with a big smile on my face like I was in complete control of the story and yet inside I was a mess. I used to
Another thing about the problem of creating a problem in a story is that it depends on what our starting point is. If we start from a student card in Card Talk, we have less information than if we are working from an individually created image, which states problem, fear and secret on the back
