If you are new to all this, before you get too nervous about the changes that you wish to implement next year, I offer one important idea to hold on to – just take an image and work with it and stay with it and don’t go into any other stuff too fast. What does […]
Anne’s student J, a former Hog, in a recent blog entry here (https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7949), wrote to her former teacher about what college German is like. Here is a follow up. J writes to Anne: “At this point I have learned how to teach myself the grammar needed to do the homework exercises when before I was trying to do them
They will feed us if we let them. What does that mean? To me, it means that if we give up worrying about controlling the direction of the discussion in the target language, and listen to them more, then the discussion will be more interesting, because it will include, not exclude, their point of view. But
Those who remember the heyday of the Realm in TPRS can recall the great excitement around the idea of building an entire year of stories around certain medieval/gang/whatever characters, as the class chose. I think I have finally figured out why the Realm didn’t work for me. Those very characters, as excited as the kids
When you assess a kid on whether he knows certain discrete facts about the language, you kill his interest in it. The tragedy is that his mind already possesses wiring (that we often do not acknowledge) that is easily capable of acquiring the language, if only it were left to its own ways of decoding, which need but
In talking about planning classes, Jim said: “You have to use those assigned structures in CI that will be interesting enough for the student to listen to you, and be able to change things up enough to not lose their attention…the less we plan…perhaps the better we will become at the art of CI.” This
This is from Jim on planning our CI lessons: I do a lot of my backward planning from songs. Of course, this isn’t always the most efficient form of planning (yet), because songs contain an array of high frequency structures and words that we may not be able to get nicely packaged in the form
Teachers who work hard don’t necessarily reach their kids. That may be true in other lines of work, but this language game is not about working hard. If it were, parents who aggressively teach their small children language would have more fluent kids later on, but this is not true. It’s just the opposite. Everybody
Jody sent this for us a few days ago: Warren Ediger, creator of the website, Successful English, wrote an interesting article this week about “How do I know if my language ability is improving?”. I am very interested in this topic and wrote to him to ask if I might use his ideas to help
How do I know I'm Getting Better at ________ (fill in the language)? Read More »
This just in from Robert Harrell: Are we fearful of fun? I thought all of you would be interested in this article. It originally appeared in the Washington Post and deals with the necessity of fun in order to learn. Robert http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/learning/why-fun-matters-in-education.html My guest is Sean Slade, director of Healthy School Communities, a program of
Maybe we became teachers because we like to be in control. But there is a problem with that. Real conversation between people, the good stuff, cannot be controlled. In a good discussion, no one voice dominates. Good talk is a dance among equals. That is where the 50% rule applies. I think that that 50% rule is
I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience during CI: You build an image with the kids, for whatever reason (story, PQA. or just to build a little one word image for fun), and pretty soon this kind of weird ownership or the image emerges from the kids. Like, you can’t change any
