There are days when we wish we could go into our classrooms and be mindless and not worry about anything at all, following a set of automatic steps that still hold our students’ attention for the entire class period. Below is a 90 minute lesson plan that does that for me. I use it […]
Having just watched the movie Outrage, I am so moved by how some gay activists must just feel so tired from fighting the discrimination and ignorance perpetrated by those who would oppose or attack them for whatever political or personal reason. I wouldn’t dare compare the intellectual snobbery and ignorance from Krashen’s colleagues’ on his work to that
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
Teaching a language without using comprehensible input is insulting to the magnificence of the human brain, which can process and decode and implement thousands of rules of language without even needing to use its conscious side – it’s all automatic. All that the brain needs to acquire a language is to hear the language spoken correctly in a
I get so tired from teaching that I have to sleep. But, somewhere after midnight, I wake up, because there is so much to process, so much to think about in this massive learning change that we are all in together now. Thoughts come into my mind and they won’t leave me alone and I have to
O.K. this is the coolest. K just sent me this from Noah. Noah is the guy who raced her in the hallway to start this thread off some months ago. Yes, that guy! How cool is that? Here he tells us what has happened since that race: Dear Mr. Slavic, Je m’appelle Noah. Je suis un
Ben, I know this topic has come up on your blog a few times in the past. Traditional language programs appear to “weed students out.” All but the best students end up dropping out of language programs. Only 4% of students acquire anything resembling fluency. Etc. This year, our department chair reminded us
Ben, Since we talked last weekend I have been taking up your and Diana Noonan’s (DPS World Languages Coordinator) challenge/mandate of using less English in the classroom. It seemed like an odd idea, after all, I LOVE speaking in Spanish with my students! There is such a sweet smell that fills the class when we
I got a good question from a colleague in her “…fourth year of teaching but my first using TPRS. I’m not sure how I stumbled across your blog, but I can’t tell you how encouraging and insightful it has been!…I am teaching in a private school and am not certified, but I am looking at
Carol sent this with my comments back in italics: Following all of the information on this thread is like trying to corral the mercury from the broken thermometer that’s scattered on the bathroom floor! We all have such varying backgrounds with this stuff. (What do we call it? TPRS? IBI – Input Based Instruction? KBLI –
It is hard to stay up with all the great ideas from Michele and Laurie and others. We are all each other’s teachers. Michele, in particular, seems to be able to incorporate so many ideas into what she does in a flurry of experimentation and activity that is designed to weed out stuff that will work
Diane Grieman sent this over from that recent L.A. TPRS meeting, as a follow up to the recent blog here on transparency: PRESENTED BY STEPHEN D. KRASHEN to a small group of language teachers in San Diego, California, on November 19, 2009 Some definitions: TRANSPARENT INPUT: the acquirer understands EVERY WORD. There is no “noise”
