August 11, 2015
As part of last year’s back-to-school posts I posted a document to get kids (and their parents) talking about tacos to explore what proficiency is and what a focus on proficiency will look like in your classroom. Since then I’ve gotten several requests to adapt that document for intermediate students. Ask and you shall receive (sometimes, […]
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August 7, 2015
Easily one of the top five topics if you look at my most popular blog posts: Choice in homework. I won’t go to deeply into what I mean by homework choice because you can see a pretty good summary here in one of the most popular posts of 2014. After you look at that, you […]
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August 3, 2015
Stressed about creating your class syllabi this year? There are a lot of really great syllabi flying around the internet. There are even competitions to see who can do the (best? most creative?) one. I have to tell you, it’s stressful. I don’t at all think it’s intended this way, but I think it feels […]
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August 1, 2015
Can language that’s learned be used in spontaneous communication? Yes. No. Maybe. It’s a big debate in the field of Second Language Acquisition research, and the authors of this article want to encourage all sides to take a more nuanced view of the issue. This question is really complex (when I was unpacking the article […]
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July 31, 2015
I hope you had a restful summer! I love back-to-school time because we’re all excited, mostly rested up, maybe feeling a little unprepared but ready to tackle what this school year has to offer. Watch what August has to offer Throughout August I’ll be posting resources and information I hope will help you get a […]
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July 21, 2015
Starting my interactive notebook
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Last spring we had a #langchat on some topics that kept coming up on the suggestion form and either never garnered quite enough votes to be a chat topic or were judged by the moderators to not have enough substance for an hour-long chat. So we polled for a “quick-snapper” chat. We offered eight of […]
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Here’s a deeply interesting question for us: why is my language ability even in interpersonal skills measured by what I can do alone, when what I can do with you, my conversation partner who can meet me in my “zone of proximal development,” is a lot more? If you’re not familiar with Vygotsky and sociocultural […]
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July 10, 2015
What if every task students did in class had a real-world application? I asked that question during last night’s #langbook chat. This summer we started what we hope will be an annual summer-break chat to encourage language teachers to read quality professional books. For the inaugural #langbook chat, we polled and participants chose the book […]
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July 7, 2015
No dog with my iced tea, please
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Cultural awareness is an idea, a concept. So how do you perform it? What is cultural awareness? In my total overhaul of my old performance assessment rubric, I’ve inserted an entire box with a mesh of the exact wording of ACTFL’s cultural awareness performance descriptors. One of the several colleagues who are helpfully picking it apart […]
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July 1, 2015
We know that students need comprehensible input in order to acquire language. Is that all we need? Learn more in this Black Box videocast. Here’s the info. It is hard to find a research model that has influenced the direction of language more than Stephen Krashen’s five-pronged hypotheses first published in the late 1970’s. Still, […]
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June 22, 2015
After a year “off,” this fall I’ll be back to teaching, in a unique opportunity (homeschool co-op) that I’m really excited about. And apprehensive about. Things that worry me: Mostly, time. I’ll be seeing my students only once a week (60 minutes for elementary, 90 minutes for upper grades). I’ll be finding something for them […]
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June 15, 2015
Did you know grammar is not a skill you can practice? Read on. And watch this. It’s already time for the second videocast of the Musicuentos Black Box. Here’s the info. Ready to watch? This eight minutes (+) will help you understand what it really means to know a language and remind you in […]
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