grammar
October 19, 2022
In the language teaching field, we have a long, treasured history of arguing and drama. We may agree or disagree on classroom setup, teacher recruitment efforts, and the best ways to encourage learners to study abroad, but primarily, our arguments center on one question: What works (or doesn’t work) for successful language acquisition? In true Sra. […]
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October 20, 2017
Verb charts are a core piece of world language curriculum. Aren’t they? I suppose they are, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because we know that visual organizers can work well for learning, and so someone once put the verbs in a chart in a certain order, and then it just got reproduced that […]
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August 12, 2017
Meet Marisa. She’s a really smart Spanish teacher… at a language school in Madrid. Her blog goes back several years, but it just came on my radar in the past year. It’s called “Aprendiendo español callejeando por Madrid,” y de veras, es una joya. Here in the first resource I’m sharing for #AuthresAugust I present […]
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May 22, 2017
I’m betting you hear this as much as I do: “Oh, you’re a language teacher? I wish I could speak (X). But I’m just no good at learning languages.” I’m also betting many of you have answered the way I have. It’s not about being “good” at languages. If you’ve acquired a first language, you’ve proven […]
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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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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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March 28, 2015
Ever feel behind the times? I just caught the current #1 song on Latin Billboard and it struck me as having two golden ingredients for a good class song: high student appeal and a couple of high frequency structures repeated. (Though I wanted to say, Dude – she moved on, she’s happy, get over it! […]
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January 19, 2015
It’s always exciting for me to announce a resource release! Today on the blog and on my Teachers Pay Teachers store I’m releasing a new FREE resource as I explore developing communicative games. My students enjoyed using a Battleship game format to practice accurate repetitions of forms of ser and estar, so I decided to […]
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December 30, 2014
It wasn’t even close. My post on the biggest mistake we make (and are pushed in so many ways to make) as language teachers was hit more than 40% more than the #2 post. We know we’re covering too much content, and we’re tired of being told that’s the right thing to do. Oh- and HAPPY […]
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December 14, 2014
I’ve skipped the #6 post for now and you’ll find out later why. Two of the resources I released this year were verb charts, a free pack of the three most common tenses and a complete pack of 8 charts available for purchase. You can find both of them here. But before you use them, […]
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March 24, 2014
A brand-new teaching resource is now available on the Learning Activity Resources page. The Complete Verb Pack contains the three charts in the free Simple Verb Pack (present, sudden past, and descriptive past) and five more charts designed to help your intermediate to pre-advanced students refine their accuracy. Each page contains an entire verb tense […]
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March 18, 2014
Corrections to simple verb pack
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The beauty of offering digital resources is as soon as I notice an error I can fix it and let you know about it! I’ve made two corrections to the sudden past chart in the Simple Verb Pack. One is just a colon that was missing, but I had also added conducir as an afterthought […]
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