The expressions in French: How are you? What is your name? sound alike: Comment allez-vous? Comment vas-tu? Comment vous appelez-vous? Comment t’appelles-tu? Not only that, there are many different ways to say each one: Ça va? Comment ça va? Vous allez bien? Comment vous portez-vous? Comment te portes-tu? etc. Now, the brain has to handle […]
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
This post is from 2009: There is a Carla Bruni song – Quelqu’un M’a Dit: There is this expression in the song: à portée de main/within reach It kept popping up in my mind after listening to the song. I put some shopping bags in my car and there it was. I walked around the side of my
An option for how you use free writes: Divide classes into teams of four or five. Read two or three sentences from a free write (editing for correctness on the fly). The winning team is the one which listens the best and produces the drawing with the most correct details from what was read aloud. Students
Here are two scenarios having to do with language learning: Scenario One Lazy little 13 year old Jean-Luc Baison, having never studied English, comes over from Lyon, France to live with his family in New York City. Jean-Luc’s dad’s company has sent him there for a year. Every time Jean-Luc hears words in New York, in whatever context, he gets
We call parents because parents want to be involved. They can’t guess that their child is not following our rules, which we painstakingly explain and enforce in the first few weeks of class, unless we tell them. Telling them in the third week of school is too late. So we make the call. Parents and
This post from 2008 is from my book PQA in a Wink! It offers a way to deal with troubled kids that is based in kindness: Mildred is the captain of the girl’s basketball team. She is rough. She had to be rough because she was thrown around physically by her abusive parents in a
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 20o9: Dr. Krashen has identified the word “non-targeted” as a key modifier in the discussion about CI, saying recently: “Constraint on interest: With non-targeted comprehensible input there are no target structures and target vocabulary that must be used in creating activities and stories. There are no grammatical or vocabulary constraints. The input
Chris mentioned an article that Byron DesPres-Berry first shared with us here in 2009, definitely worth a re-read:: http://www.fremdsprachendidaktik.rwth-aachen.de/Ww/programmatisches/pachl.html
A repost from 2010: We were talking about how important it is for us to understand that we don’t have to get our students to learn. I would like to expand on that thought just a bit. The deal is, that when we as the teacher have a need, visible or hidden, that our students
This from Robert was first posted here in Sept. of 2008 and is worth dusting off a bit. Robert do you still do this? How have your timed writing classes evolved? Something that I occasionally do with Timed Writings (starting in late first year) is have them get in groups and share their stories with
