Become a more confident language teacher.
Pop-up Grammar is a core strategy used by teachers that have been trained in Acquisition Driven Instruction (ADI) with a focus on making input comprehensible. Whereas grammar has traditionally been a major focus of instruction and therefore instructional minutes in language courses, Pop-Up Grammar flips the traditional, explicit grammar instruction model on its head. Pop-Up…
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Over the last decade, I have come to realize that I entered the profession of language education with a lot of beliefs about language and language teaching, but those beliefs were based on impressions that I had from my own personal experience, not on facts. I began learning about language when I began learning about…
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What is grammar instruction? What does it do for language acquisition, and what should its role be in a language classroom? These are some of the questions that a group of enthusiastic language teachers tackled on Friday evening at OFLA with Keynote speaker, Paul Toth (read his bio here). Following Carol Gaab’s address at the OFLA awards group,…
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After four decades of research in the area of second language acquisition, it is clear that language is acquired not from practice (drills), but from consistent and constant exposure to input. Input is indispensable to language acquisition–meaning that language cannot be acquired without it. This idea of the indispensability of input was largely absent from my language…
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I recently published a new story script, one that targets -AR imperfect verb conjugations. Targeting has been a big topic of conversation lately, so I want to talk about what I mean! Should I target vocabulary? Let’s be clear here–the kind of targeting that I do with this story (and the way that I intend…
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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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We’ve all said it at some point: “HELP! My students don’t get [when to use ser or estar][how to form the subjunctive][the difference between “I have” and “you have” in Spanish]! What should I do???“ Accuracy matters. Helping students develop the ability to use grammar concepts correctly in their speech and writing has always been…
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Yippee Yay! Dana Wilson emailed me most of the French translations of my Spanish question word posters earlier this week, and Catherine Ousselin (@CatherineKU72) helped me out with a few more! Mercy beau coup! Click on the image to download the file. What else is new for the 2015 school year? Check out these recently…
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I am a very bossy person by nature, and unfortunately I didn’t realize it until right after I graduated from high school. By the grace of God, I’ve learned how to tame my nasty natural instincts…although it’s not always easy! Being married helps 🙂 I think that this is why the game that I’m about…
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