Earlier this week, I was catching up on some blog reading and noticed a pattern…MovieTalk, MovieTalk, MovieTalk!

After all of these repetitions, I got to thinking…anyone using MovieTalk in the TPRS world is using it because of Michele Whaley! She has blogged about it (somewhat) extensively, and in Anchorage especially has worked hard to provide us training and peer collaboration in the method. Isn’t it incredible what an impact one person can have? She discovered the method through a string of comments at the bottom of a Stephen Krashen article and got connected to Ashley Hastings, who seems to be the expert on the method at the university level. As far as Michele and Ashley know, there was only one high school teacher using MovieTalk before Michele started sharing about it on her blog. Pretty amazing!! It offers such compelling support for teachers to put their ideas out there and start blogging! All of those hours that we spend on rabbit trails through the internet, individually, become worth it when teachers across the nation and world benefit from our discoveries.

Blog on!

4 replies on “The Power of a Person

  1. I have been missing our monthly meetings. I have been coaching and it is sucking up all of my time. I should be back in actions for march though. Movie talk bombed when I tried to do it. Maybe I need to see Michele do it.

    1. I am thinking of trying it next week with the Paperman clip as we just are doing a unit on relationships and telenovelas for my Spanish 2 class and Nemo for my 8th graders as an every Friday activity for the last 15-20 min/class. Do you think you’d try again? What would you change to have it be a more successful activity? Thanks for sharing. (I, as well, have been coaching up until a few weeks ago and then missed 2 weeks for medical complications! Trying to get back into the swing of things!)

  2. I used it today with a Caillou clip suggested in the Teacher’s Guide for Houdini Chapter 5 and IT WAS AWESOME! I muted the 3 minute clip and played it for the kids, narrating EVERYTHING observable and pausing every 5 seconds or so, on average. We made predictions, connected the video to the class (the hand draws a face. the face has a mouth. Jason has a mouth!! Jason has a big mouth and talks too much in Spanish class!!). My kids left being able to recognize vocabulary that I never want to take class time to teach explicitly, like stoplight, bald, towel, bathtub, shadow, etc. I can focus on high frequency words and use MovieTalk to fill in the extras. LOVE IT!

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