Become a more confident language teacher.
I taught Spanish 1 and 2 for 3 years after switching to TCI, and here is what I ended up creating–keep in mind that this is just what I did, and even if you are using my curriculum, you are free to do it differently than I did! Use the curriculum maps provided below to determine what…
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If I didn’t know that my last post would open a can of worms, I should have! In this instance, though, I am quite glad that it did. I realized that I had a lot of misunderstandings and was making a lot of unfair assumptions. Thank you to everyone that has been helping me learn through…
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about curriculum. Six years ago, I started posting the curriculum units that I had created for my own, personal classroom use so that other teachers could use them, too. At first, I was just posting isolated activities and lesson plan outlines, and I eventually started formatting them and explaining activities…
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So you want to build a class library, eh? Where to begin?? Beyond leveled readers and children’s books, what are other teachers filling their class libraries with? This question keeps popping up in various online forums, and so I think it is high time that we put together a collaborative database that teachers can reference…
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If you are or are striving to become a TCI teacher and are using a textbook, you are not alone! There are scores of master TCI teachers that, for need or want, still work from a textbook. My favorite story is that Mira Canion knows Realidades so well that you can tell her any word…
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The second to last session that I attended at ACTFL 2015 was with Amy Lenord. Amy has written fairly extensively on her blog about why and how she has moved away from giving traditional vocabulary lists to her students. As I was busy covering the session on Twitter (search Twitter for #unlistvocab #actfl15 for my…
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Grammar. You just cringed; didn’t you?! I knew it. Golly there seems to be a lot of discord in the virtual realm lately—lots of professional disagreement about many different aspects of language teaching; but nothing that seems to bring out the war cries like a good old-fashioned mention of grammar. As Justo Lamas croons in…
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Because we know that students acquire language through comprehensible input, finding make-up work for students that miss class that actually helps them to make up what was missed is a HUGE challenge. I’m going to share some things that I have done, and I ask that you would add what you’ve done in the comments!! The most important…
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In the most recent issue of The Language Educator, Sandy Cutshall published an article entitled “Groundbreaking Study from ACTFL Measures Listening and Reading–Expands Understanding of Interpretive Skills” that provides a high level of support for teachers that focus on providing their students with extensive amounts of input that is comprehensible. Interpretation is communicative. This article describes…
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You’ve probably been thinking about the start of the 2015 school year since somewhere around October of 2014: you know, about when you started to think, “Man! If only I had done [x], we would be doing amazing right now! Can’t wait to start off the school year right next year…” So you may already have…
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