Become a more confident language teacher.
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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This evening–Sunday, May 17, 2015–you can attend a TCI training for FREE from the comfort of your own home. Join Paulino Brener’s Google Hangout “Educators, Performers, Creators Show #15” at 6pm CDT to hear TCI strategies from Carol Gaab, Kristy Placido, Carrie Toth, and me! Here is the link to the Hangout: https://plus.google.com/…/events/cac27nnu40brd8cggk5tj67r3ds. Click the image below…
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Michele Whaley, a Russian teacher at West High School in Anchorage, invited me to her classroom in 2009 to observe a TPRS® lesson. I went in expecting to see a glorified version of Simon Says. What I saw bemused me, and it drove me to park myself in front of my TV for the next…
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For the first time since learning about TPRS® and Comprehensible Input, I am not teaching through CI, but learning through CI. I’ve of course participated as a student in demonstrations and coaching sessions in languages that I don’t know, but I’ve never “studied” a language for an extended period of time. (I say “studied” with quotation marks because I…
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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,…
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We had a great Alaskans for Language Acquisition (AFLA) conference last weekend in Seward! The only bummer was that Cynthia Hitz didn’t join us this year 🙁 Michele (the Alaska Language Teacher of the Year!) has already blogged about it, and you can read her post here. I have found it nearly impossible to carve…
Read MoreI received an email from a new-to-TPRS®/TCI reader this morning, and it is one that I’ve read many times in different forms: “I have been trying your curriculum maps for Spanish I & II for 3 days. Spanish I has been going okay. Spanish II has NOT. I tried the fue activity, and to my horror,…
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One common question that I was asked in my sessions at iFLT ’14 was, “I thought that our goal is to provide students with comprehensible input…so why do so many of these activities contain output?” Great question! Is output bad? No comprehension based teacher thinks that output is bad. Output is a good thing and one of the end…
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…
Read MoreSpecial Person Interviews build community. When done well, students find connections with all of their classmates. Teachers learn more about each one of their students, and everyone’s voice and presence is valued. And oh yeah–all the while, students are acquiring language. What’s not to love? HISTORY OF SPECIAL PERSON INTERVIEWS As far as I am…
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