About a week ago I posted an article about Danielle, a member of the current Zoom group studying the Ultimate CI Book 1. Danielle was facing a difficult middle-of-the-year observation process, made no less difficult by Covid as well as an entrenched way of teaching grammar in her building. Her pre-observation meeting didn’t go well,
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
I got this email from a mother in Denver in 2010 – this is a repost. It broke my heart then and now again seven years it has the same effect. We need to get ourselves together and fight to end this kind of situation: Hi Ben, I was wondering if you are offering any workshops or
A repost from 2010: It is an incredible thing to hear, just before class as the kids are quieting down, their genius, fun, humor in the form of their discussion, which all kind of fades out if you are going to start a grammar class or something ridiculous like that. Why not keep that fun, that
Teenagers are trapped. They can’t go back to the joys of their younger days, which were squeezed out of them somewhere between 4th and 7th grade. They can’t go forward either. They’re stuck. Oh, but what wouldn’t they give for a break in their day from the endless boring tasks that led Tolstoy to describe
The mind simply cannot serve two masters. The human unconscious mind is far superior, infinitely superior, in the artful process of decoding and understanding the sounds of a foreign language than is the conscious mind. It does so just by hearing and reading it – automatically! The language teachers of the future will know this.
There is currently a great Big Picture presentation on diving that syncs great with a lot of year-beginning vocabulary. It’s called “Diving In” and can be found at: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/09/diving_in.html In Circling with Balls, we are using the verb “jump” an awful lot, and this picture set takes that and drills it wonderfully. I used the terms
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
Susanna Kesterson thank you for sending me this which I share here with all of us: ACTFL Announces New Position Statements Source: FLTEACH The ACTFL Board of Directors recently approved the following position statements: * Use of the Target Language in the Classroom (http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=5151 ) * Language Learning for Heritage and Native Speakers (http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=5152 )
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
