Preaching to Acquire

As I sit here preparing my presentation for Mitten CI, I can't help but reflect on how far I've come in my teaching practices in the past few years. Two years ago, I was still using a textbook to guide my instruction.  I was giving my students vocabulary lists to memorize, and while I tried my best to make those activities "fun," it was really pretty miserable for them (and me).  I also would use the grammar activities in the textbook and teach the grammar "rules."  Again, I tried to make it as interesting as possible, but it was also pretty miserable for everyone involved. That's why I'm SO fired up to give my presentation on "Using the Textbook to Develop Proficiency" at Mitten CI .  You guys, if I had known these incredible strategies years ago, I could have made my textbook units SO much more compelling and comprehensible for my students.  It also would have made my transition from textbook to CI much less stressful!  There are so m...

I'm going to share a little bit of my heart with you all in this post.  My teacher heart has this crazy passion fire burning in it, and I want to challenge those of you who teach language using comprehensible input. Obviously, this is going to differ from state to state, but I will speak from my experience as a Wisconsin teacher. In my methods classes, we read about Krashen and his research, but we did not spend time discussing or practicing how to use that in our language classrooms.  Therefore, I had graduated college and started teaching using the same methods that I was taught.  I LOVED my Spanish classes and assumed that all students would find success the way I had.  Wrong. So I started looking for more resources on how to teach certain things because my students weren't getting it.  I knew I needed to make a change.  I stumbled upon The Comprehensible Classroom by Martina Bex  and from there started swirling down the rabbit hole of ALL OF ...