(Feel free to skip down to the practical videos on Estabishing Meaning and on Pop-up Grammar!) Good language teaching consists of identifiable, learnable skills. Regardless of the curriculum you use, regardless of your personality or overall teaching style, these skills are what make it work. But what are those skills? How important are different skills […]
As soon as this school year is over, you will probably want simply to rest. There may also be training opportunities that you have put off this year because you were trying just to stay afloat, or training you hope to get before taking on the next year. There are several impressive and worthwhile opportunities […]
The Power of Public Art Check out this chalk drawing by David Zinn, a world-renowned street artist who happens to live in my neighborhood. Think of all the ways you and your students could talk about it in the target language! At all levels, public art can be a superb source of learning and interaction, […]
Are you? Tomorrow I head to New Orleans to join old and new friends in the CI Posse, a growing group of twenty-odd teachers and content creators working together to boost joy and success at ACTFL 2018 and beyond. If you haven’t discovered it yet, check out the CI Posse blog, which includes my “Why […]
This post narrows the focus of the previous posts on Your Teaching Body (Location & Variation, Movement & Posture) right down to our hands and faces. The uses of gestures as meta-conversation, especially, are easy to learn and much more powerful than I realized when I first began to explore them. This post is the […]
I often invite observers or members of my classes to list things they’ve seen me do that boosted their understanding of the language and their sense of being part of a language-learning community. I do this to help identify a bunch of techniques and skills that are highly learnable and coachable–without highlighting such skills, it’s […]
Back from blogging exile, I’m itching to share a series on tricks and techniques that observers in my classes at this summer’s iFLT and Express Fluency conferences found especially memorable! I’m especially excited to offer an expansive collection of voice and body techniques for joyful, successful teaching. See also: techniques highlighted after Express Fluency ‘17, including […]
Yes, this blog is still rolling! I’ve simply just returned from trip number seventeen this calendar year, covering fifteen states and three countries, so my blogging has been more like blah-ging. During those trips I got to learn and try lots of fun and useful things, one of which is the subject of this post, […]
Quirky Scripts is a lesson requiring almost no prep that can be used repeatedly all year, at every level. It’s also a way for students to acquire “advanced” language really early on with minimal effort. Skim the how-to or scroll down for three scripts and a dozen reasons these Quirky Scripts are so useful. Read this post’s predecessor, Quirky […]
No, this isn’t about tech trends or teaching fads. It’s a confession and a simple solution. Confession: My reading-and-listening habit in one of my target languages almost disappeared this winter. Why? Because I hadn’t lined up the Next Thing. The Next Thing The Next Thing is the resource you plan to use just as […]