January 19, 2016
Where is the magic intersection of great children’s literature and stories particularly helpful for early language acquisition? I’ve spent a lot of time investigating my answers to this question and I hope my choices and the adaptations I offer here are helpful to you, whether you teach the young or the old who will tolerate […]
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January 11, 2016
Blogs to Watch 2016
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Whom are you listening to? It’s a critical question. Whom you’re listening to in the long-term can have a significant impact on your practice in the classroom, and that’s a big deal. Here’s my annual post about whom I’m listening to on new(ish) websites. I’m not having a “YOU MUST READ THESE BLOGS!” feeling for […]
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January 6, 2016
Stuck and confused. Those are the two words that describe how I feel as I contemplate what I want to change, do, and be in 2016. (No, I don’t have to have it figured out by January 1. There’s a lot of 2016 left.) I’m thankful for the online language teaching community for helping me find some […]
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December 31, 2015
My old rubric served me well for four years, but it was time for a change. A clean slate, a lot of websites, a lot of feedback, and a lot of collaborative brainstorming later, I finally had something I was willing to put out and test out. Check the post below – the links go […]
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December 29, 2015
Book Club 2015: Make It Stick
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I appreciate anecdotes, but I’ve been passionate for a long time about finding out what science says about how people learn in general, and how people learn language, and why people choose to learn anything. It’s what makes Brain Rules and Drive my top two books from the last decade to recommend to any teacher. […]
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December 26, 2015
In the twelfth year of designing syllabi, you may not have “the syllabus to end them all” – of course not! We’re always changing based on successes and challenges, right? But by this time I knew the five ingredients I had to have in a syllabus, and you wanted to hear about them. This August […]
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December 22, 2015
How I love to read. Reading is a way I both escape the world and try to figure it out, to learn new words and meet new ways of thinking. If you like, you can check out my posts tagged book club. Last year I put out a series of them that crowded the blog […]
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December 19, 2015
The third and fourth most popular posts of 2015 were very close, but with the benefit of a few extra months the post on task completion on rubrics barely edged out the #4 post to take the bronze medal. I’m so glad I wondered about task completion and its importance in life and in rubrics […]
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December 17, 2015
December found us doing our first formal assessment of the semester. That is my reality this year, and I love it. We go at our own pace and make our own rules and I don’t see my students enough to warrant spending our precious class time on assessment instead of engaging ourselves with the language. […]
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December 15, 2015
Voice and choice! Right? Well, if the sheer volume of content under my “choice” tag is any indication, I believe so. I’m convinced by research on autonomy and purpose that if we can give students options that speak to their inner motivation, then and only then will we end up with significant percentages of proficient speakers out […]
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December 13, 2015
After years of teaching students between Novice High and Intermediate Mid, I found myself teaching students with no measurable proficiency. They did not know what loco meant (and had never heard of Zorro!?!) (and hated all heartthrob boy bands?!?!). It was new territory for me. And it was time to take a look at my homework choice […]
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December 11, 2015
In March I discovered the catchy, learner-friendly song “El perdón” and blogged about ways to use it in both novice and intermediate classes. That post was the 5th-most popular post of 2015. New song: El perdón for two levels Ever feel behind the times? I just caught the current #1 song on Latin Billboard and […]
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