Become a more confident language teacher.
For the last three years, Spanish students have been able to follow the top stories from the Spanish-speaking world in El mundo en tus manos. Each week, Maris Hawkins and I identify important and interesting current events and write up comprehensible summaries so that beginning language learners can understand. As we prepare for the 2019-2020…
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I 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…
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Thanks to Samantha Uebel, who sent me French translations for my QAR materials, all of you French teachers out there can rest easy knowing that you can pop into class tomorrow and try out QAR without having to do the grunt work of translating everything for yourselves!! Yippee! Click here to download the materials in French,…
Read MoreOver the last year, I have received many email requests from teachers, administrators, and conference planners that need to know how TPRS® and other Comprehensible Input strategies meet Common Core standards. Teachers must explain the connections so that they are permitted to use these best practice strategies in their classrooms, administrators seek to know whether…
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Scott Benedict is the king of assessment, so if you have never before pondered accurate assessment, standards-based assessment, etc., you should probably hop on over to his site, Teach for June, and spend the next few weeks there before you come back and finish reading this post. If you have already reached the conclusion that it…
Read MoreA six word memoir is a good activity shared by the Creative Language Class blog that could be used to review stories, chapters, books…anything. Visit their blog post on 6-Word Memoirs to read a complete description, but here it is in a nutshell: Students read a text Students randomly select or are assigned a character. Students write…
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Have you ever taken a moment to think about just how complex ‘reading comprehension’ is? There are an infinite number of skills that a good reader must possess in order to truly comprehend a text, and very few happen consciously. This week, I have realized that my students are often unable to separate ‘this’ from…
Read MoreNote to the reader: this post should have been published on 2/12/13. Too many distractions!! Kristy’s recent post on #authres reminded me that it was sitting in my draft folder waiting to be published. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I had to settle to be a passive participant in #langchat tonight.…
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A bulletin board bar graph is the perfect tool to bring together data and discussion–and it can be as simple (read: quick) or complicated (read: time-consuming) as you desire to make it. PERSONALIZE YOUR CLASS VOCABULARY LISTS I use bulletin board bar graphs within the framework of Comprehension Based language teaching. One of the reasons…
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