proficiency
May 14, 2024
Because I write about good ideas on the internet, it’s easy to assume I’m full of good ideas (lie: most of them I stole from someone else). Let’s be open about some of the bad ones. I’ll go first. It’s nearly the end of the school year and as the good proficiency-focused language teachers we […]
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September 19, 2019
One thing at a time: Step Two
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So you want to become a better language teacher, and that’s awesome! You’ve laid a good foundation in getting to know some sound research principles involving how people acquire and learn languages thanks to Steve Smith. Now, it’s time for Step 2. Is the foundation important? Absolutely, it’s critical. But to build on that foundation […]
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September 16, 2019
One thing at a time: Step One
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It’s happened at my Camp Musicuentos workshops. It’s happened in inservice sessions. It’s happened in conference presentations and workshops and on Twitter and in blog comments. It’s the big question that many preservice, new, and second-profession teachers ask: I want to be a great language teacher and do all this curriculum stuff and teach all […]
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May 21, 2019
You teach, you input, you provide experiences, you assess, you re-assess, you plan and prepare and teach again. At some point, I think we all wonder deep down – what if someone else were assessing them? What would the results be? Not here to #showyoumine I’m adamantly against such middle school showmanship reflected in tactics […]
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May 14, 2019
Think about yourself and the bilingual people you know. How did you all become proficient in a new language? A while ago, Marc’s post on 5 things to tell kids on the first day of class reminded me that I had done a survey related to that question. I felt like I discovered some important […]
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March 28, 2017
Subtitle: The sheer, incomparable power of making meaning. Other subtitle: Anecdotes from my Russian journey. When I tell people that I’m learning Russian, I get two reactions, one right after the other. First, Wow, that’s neat! Then, Why? I don’t really know how to answer this. Before I started learning it (this time), I didn’t […]
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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 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 4, 2015
How about an elementary rubric?
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It’s possible a good rubric for communicating performance-towards-proficiency for early language learners exists, but if it does, I haven’t seen it. (If you have, please share in a comment!) See this post for my update from this past summer on my more complex rubric designed to be used with no younger than middle school students. […]
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November 16, 2015
Love the textbook or hate it? Convinced you can’t teach well unless you pitch that textbook in the trash? Convinced you can’t teach without it or you’ll lose your sanity? Wherever you fall, if a textbook is a tool in your classroom, this post is for you. Note that I believe a textbook is just […]
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September 7, 2015
If you’ve enjoyed using – or considered using – the taco talk to help novices and intermediates (and their parents) understand what it means to learn for proficiency, you’ll love this resource. Many thanks to Iya Nemastil, a Japanese teacher in Ohio, for taking this idea and putting it in a beautifully visualized form. I’m […]
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August 24, 2015
This might be my most important resource release this year. First, you can read here about all the things that frustrated me about that snazzy 2011 rubric that I used to use (and that got downloaded from this site a lot). Some of them probably frustrated those of you who used it, too. So I decided to […]
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