There are lots of ways to connect with colleagues: professional conferences, email groups, web forums, blogs, social media, . . . . Teachers should take advantage of these to whatever degree is reasonable. But one of the easiest, most rewarding types of teacher-teacher interaction is simply to visit a colleague’s class, or even to get […]
Tag Archives: school
Your Language-Learning Happy Place
Your Happy Place is a mental state or a physical setting in which you are most at ease or most energized. You may have a general Happy Place, or you may have a host of Happy Places for different activities or purposes. Do you have a language-learning Happy Place? Mine are (a) just after breakfast, in […]
Pre-Reading and Three-Reading
The last post celebrated the benefits of rereading texts. This post delivers the promised rereading activity that you can use on your own or with a small group if you are an autodidact, or, if you are a teacher, can conduct in class or assign to students. If you’ve tried adding a bunch of different sounds […]
Rando Mitem, Your Friend and Mine: using random items to spark conversations
Note: this article is for both teachers and learners. If you are learning on your own or in a small group, you can easily adapt the ideas for your purposes. How many things can you say in your target language about the item in the first picture? What kinds of things can you say? What […]
What You Can Do, I Can Talk About: Using students’ quirky skills to generate language
In the last post we talked about using party tricks as something to talk about in a target language. In a classroom setting, students’ special skills, including party tricks, are a compelling, useful source of content. Just like with a picture, movie, or story, the teacher can use students’ non-linguistic skills either to target specific linguistic […]
“Whatever” Works: Non-Targeted CI Lesson 4, “Frivolity Is the Mother Of Invention”
My second thought when I see this is “Think of all the classy waffles I could make.” This is the Pixel, a customizable waffle maker; you can create your own design by depressing any of the 81 squares. But my first thought is, “This is Non-Targeted CI gold.” That’s right, golden-brown on the breakfast table is straight gold an hour later. […]
“Whatever” Works: Non-Targeted CI Lesson 3, “Not Today”
Three of the following four things happened on this day (November 3) in history. Can you guess which one did not? “Not Today,” or “Not This Day In History,” is an easy-to-plan game of Non-Targeted Comprehensible Input, presented here as part of the Whatever Works series. Simply check a Today In History list on Wikipedia or […]
What Makes “Whatever” Work – Essentials Of Any Language Program
We’re in the middle of a series whose basic point is that, when it comes to providing learners with material in the target language, “whatever works.” If you expected a catch, you expected right. Here it is: That anything works is true of content. It’s not true of teacher-learner relationships, learner-learner relationships, classroom culture, or fundamental approaches and […]
“Whatever” Works: Non-Targeted CI Lesson 2, “Thank You, Justin Bieber”
Justin Bieber has done at least one good thing for me: He provided the impetus and the core material for this lesson. It’s another “Whatever Works” lesson, delivering non-targeted Comprehensible Input. (See yesterday’s post for an introduction to non-targeted CI and another lesson plan.) Really, this is another Quirky Feature (again, see yesterday’s post), which I […]
Language: The School Subject That’s Not a School Subject
If you grow up on a desert island with at least one other person, you will not automatically know physics. You may know the effects of what is studied in physics—say, when the other person pushes you out of a tree—but you will not know the academic discipline called physics. You will be fluent in at […]