Become a more confident language teacher.
In the Northern Hemisphere, it is SPRING! And with spring comes celebrations. Many of you reading this blog teach languages that are spoken in countries with deep religious roots, and those roots are super visible in March and April! Easter, Passover, Equinox, and Ramadan are all holidays and celebrations that occur in the Spring. It…
Read MoreGuest post by Meghan Loveless, Assistant Curriculum Developer for the Comprehensible Classroom I’m always looking for new activities that I can use to get my students on their feet and moving around the room while still engaged with input. When Hayley Ross, who is an incredible English Teacher in my hallway, shared with me a…
Read MoreMy 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 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 of us are not, and we require careful planning to…
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…
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