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 […]
The fastest way to make a class feel stupid is to say stuff to them that they can’t understand. Therefore I strenuously suggest that we be very careful before casually starting the year by asking our students in first year courses to be able to process what we think are very basic greetings, which in
A repost from 2009: I went online and tried to flesh out this recent Krashen term non-targeted comprehensible input. All I got was an article from a Lydia White of McGill University that didn’t make a lick of sense to me as a classroom teacher. Oh well. What does non-targeted comprehensible input mean? Dr. Krashen
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
I think of a classroom in which the kids feel no stress. All they have to do is listen in a happy way to the French language. The room can be described by this line from Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage: Là,tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté. There, all is order and beauty,
In a blog entry last summer I had asked Doug Stone to comment on the idea of change to new ways of teaching, or change in any field. His response is repeated here: Hi Ben, So the idea for the model for resistance to change came from my experience with acculturation which began not long
It saddens me when the passion that some of us have for comprehensible input methods is misinterpreted as being some kind of boastful claim to expertise and superiority in the field. Just because we write and talk about what we do with such intensity and excitement, people latch onto that in oppositional terms and accuse
O.K. this blog entry may wig a few people out. If it starts to make no sense, just stop reading. I think you may have to be a little on the crazy side for it to make sense. It makes sense to me, though, but then I’m a little on the crazy side. So here
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
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
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
