Shorter Reading Approach to Novels

I must confess that I have struggled with how to get the novels in and at times I wonder why the kids think it is so boring. Well, I have asked around about how people do it and tried a bit of what people suggested in class today. It was vastly improved. I think the [...]

Backward Planning, a missing element that was needed

This year I have been doing a lot more backward planning from the novels and it has really boosted my stories. I have basically been picking out some of the important phrases from the novel and putting it into the story. This has freed me from using a script all the time and has really [...]

Are we exposing our students to what they need?

I have been reading a book by Frank Smith entitled, Reading FAQ. I am going to add it to my books list, but I thought I would give a brief excerpt here. I having been thinking about the idea that we need to totally revolutionize the way we view language acquisition. Traditionally, we have just [...]

Keeping it Personalized

I have discovered that it is essential that a language is personalized. As soon as I start talking about something that they are not interested in I begin to loose them. When I add a new detail, it sparks the interest again. I need get better at circling so that I don’t loose the kids [...]

Following the rules

I realized today that rules are brilliant when you enforce them. It can be easy for teachers to just let it slide, but today in class I really enforced the rules. When I did this, it wasn’t in a harsh way. I simply just stated the rule to class when I saw that someone was [...]

False Beginners

When teaching a language like Spanish I am bound to run into the idea of false beginners. There will be so many different levels of Spanish with my students when they enter the classroom. A false beginner is a student who has prior knowledge of Spanish, but is in a class with true beginners, who [...]

Fluent in Karate

I have made a new TPRS friend, Dirk Frewing. It is really great to be able to collaborate ideas and to learn from others. I don’t think I could do this without it, to be honest. Dirk made a comment in an email the other day that really got me thinking. He said:
So much of [...]

Pictures with Reading

On days when we are reading I think that it would be a great idea to have some pictures to go with the stories. I was just reading on Ben Slavic’s blog and he was writing about stories that he creates of the students. In order to create a higher interest he is considering putting [...]

Foreign Language Education, The Easy Way

This is another great book by Krashen. When I first saw it, it make me think that the title was misleading. The Easy Way to me meant, teaching the easy way out. In other words not putting much effort into teaching. And perhaps there is some truth to this if you teach the way the [...]

The Power of Reading

This is a great book on the effect that reading can have on learning languages. Just reading it made me want to read more. It is by Krashen and contains a lot of research that points toward the benefits of reading as well as some ideas for how to implement more reading into the class.