My students and I made strong, lasting connections as we co-created stories. Whether it was TPRS® (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) or OWIs (One Word Images), we had so much fun being creative together. It was through storyasking that I first experienced the power of acquisition-driven instruction. As I helped my students to understand…
Read MoreStoryasking à la TPRS is one of my very favorite methods for facilitating language acquisition, and it is also one of the most complicated to learn. In this week’s #summerSOMOSfunCLUB, Elicia Cárdenas and I shared some steps and strategies for maximizing its success in your classroom. Scroll to the end of the post to watch…
Read MoreThe bird’s out of the cage, and it’s time to share my big secret with YOU, my readers!! At ACTFL, I announced the launch of GARBANZO, the new web application from The Comprehensible Classroom. The journey to create an app that would help teachers find reading material that is suitable for early language learners began…
Read MoreYou’ve got a new comprehension-based curriculum, and you’d be 100% sold if it weren’t for that storyasking part. You’ve got a script, but what the heck do you do with it? Many teachers have asked the same question before. Storyasking is an invented word meant to differentiate creating a story from telling a story. If you’ve…
Read MoreASK THE STORY: How to Use Matava-Style Scripts to Create a Class Story Click here to download a print-ready PDF of this post. Some teachers are really great at creating class stories on the spot that provide zillions of repetitions of the target structures while still staying “in-bounds” (using only vocabulary that students already know). Others…
Read MoreWith a total of 19 Tweets, Facebook tags, emails, text messages, and Facebook messages in 48 hours, I am just thrilled to know that I am the first person you think of when you hear a good poop story (thank you, Correcaca). Perhaps you saw on the news that there is a new caca-criminal in town–and this…
Read MoreI first heard the idea for “Today in History”; or rather, “NOT Today in History” by reading a blog post from Justin Slocum Bailey on the Indwelling Language blog back in 2014. Click here to read the first post: and here to read the second. Recently, I have been looking for new kinds of ‘puzzles’ that…
Read MoreFor the last several years, I have participated in an annual event at a local college. I have used more or less the same lesson plan each year, and you can read through it in detail and download the materials that I use for it here. This year, I had taught two 55 minute classes. In…
Read MoreCOMPREHENSIBLE INPUT IS SO FREAKING COOL! So far, French is the only language that I have set out to learn through input. It’s an…ongoing…project that I leave and come back to once every few months as time permits. I’ve read novels from Fluency Matters and listened to the audio versions, read news article summaries in…
Read MoreIsn’t it fun when a great video pops into your newsfeed? I remember seeing The Janitor Story before, but I had forgotten the ending when one of my mom friends shared it over the weekend! Without my ‘real’ computer (my 5yo killed it with a kombucha spill) and unable to work on any ongoing projects,…
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