TPRS
February 25, 2014
This guest post is a response to last week’s “What I hate about TPRS.” First, I would like to thank Sara-Elizabeth for writing such thought-provoking posts. You gave us a great deal to consider and challenged our thinking. THAT is always GOOD! And many thanks for the opportunity to be a guest blogger. I won’t […]
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February 18, 2014
A friend of mine told me he frequently gets asked if I’m a TPRS teacher. My answer: TPRS is an am vs. use question for me. Yes, I use. No, I am not “a TPRS teacher.” There are so many strategies from TPRS that have made me a much better teacher and that I use in almost every class […]
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February 13, 2014
What I love about TPRS
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Let me give you a run-down of my teaching career. After I graduated from high school, I spent four years at a liberal arts college learning a lot about what it means to be a good teacher and almost nothing about how to be a good language teacher. After graduating from college, I spent three […]
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September 17, 2013
Seven keys to a great story
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It’s no secret – I believe the single best way to keep students’ attention, deliver comprehensible input, frame new content, and interact with vocabulary is storytelling. You may not think you are a natural storyteller, but you are. Everyone is. Telling stories is a part of life. You tell your spouse the crazy things your child […]
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August 26, 2013
I recently joined the Ñandu listserv, a service of Ñandutí, the Center for Applied Linguistics‘s resource center for early (K-8) language learning. As a member of the listserv I get questions and recommendations from other elementary world language teachers. (I don’t currently teach elementary levels formally, but I do a workshop for 18 months to […]
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August 3, 2013
As we all go back to school and meet new students and try to push them to try something really new and maintain target language in the classroom, as you maintain it, commit to make your target language input comprehensible and make sure students know you’re committed to it. Show them this video: This baby […]
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May 7, 2013
Once upon a time there was a teacher who knew that the textbook just wasn’t fostering proficiency in her students but she didn’t know what to do differently. One day, she attended a short workshop on storytelling that changed her life. Jeffrey the martian penguin and Garfield and Paco the cowboy who bought the horse […]
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March 18, 2013
Developing curriculum is time consuming but worth it – unless the time it takes makes you give up on communicative teaching all together! I’ve blogged about some ways and even more ways on easing into developing curriculum. Here are two more. Tackle one unit, one class at a time. This is part of taking baby steps. If you’re […]
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February 22, 2013
This is what your students are hearing. Comprehensible input is the key! Make sure you’re giving your students lots of input, but it’s at least as important to make sure that they’re understanding what you’re saying.
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January 25, 2013
A while ago this comment was left on the old Musicuentos site, on the post “Do something drastic – kick the vocab quiz“: “Can you give us some examples of what activities you do to ensure mastery of the vocabulary? And do you have any advice on how to promote this kind of teaching/learning in […]
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July 2, 2012
When people ask me what I do, and I tell them, I always get an interesting response. After all, I suppose I am in kind of a unique situation – my primary responsibility is Spanish department head and Spanish teacher for advanced electives, but I do spend quite a few minutes a week teaching my […]
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February 3, 2012
A storytelling success story
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In honor of last night’s #langchat topic, I want to share something that happened in one of my kindergarten classes this week. At my school, we have mandatory Spanish from age 3 in preschool through 10th grade. Until 2nd grade, however, students only receive between 15 and 20 minutes of instruction per week. I’ve been […]
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