I’m writing this for an English teacher in France. I’ve never met her and I’ve decided not to ask her name, but one of her students is coming to me for private lessons. « Pierre » is in the seventh grade, which, officially, in France would be his second year of English lessons. But in
Teachers often discover CI after several years, even many many years, of using other methods. Old habits are hard to break. A question that often comes up s how to transition from former methods to one that stresses Comprehensible Input. Where to find help?
There is an urgent need for better ways to teach students to listen. While we all know that listening is one of the four focal skills, in my own opinion it is both the most essential and the most neglected. Teachers who privilege Comprehensible Input know that students have to be either listening or reading
More and more foreign language teachers are talking about Comprehensible Input. Here I try to answer the most common questions teachers ask
Animal trainers know that it is easier to teach a horse or dog what you want it to do, than to teach it not to do something. “No” is an abstract notion. In the same way, it is much easier to teach students what is right than it is to teach them not to do
The short answer is: We don’t. How do you know that “He goed” is not grammatically correct? At some point in their infancy, most children will say “He goed”. Then they stop saying it, long before a school teacher tells them that it is not good grammar. Good grammar, like vocabulary, is acquired before it
TPRS is doing what people have been doing ever since the Tower of Babel: communicating with others using simple, comprehensible vocabulary in the context of a story.
Many students have been so enchanted by the book and its drawings that they have bought their own copy.
This post was written in August 2019, long before we realized that it would be impossible to hold the conference in Agen in 2020. We then went on-line with the help of Karen Rowan and over 300 teachers registered for the on-line conference. In 2021 it seemed to me that, in spite of the success
Every summer for the last ten years something magic has happened in Agen, France. Teachers from around the world have gathered in a friendly little town in southwest France and particpated in what many of them have called a life-changing experience. They come together because they have heard of a different way of teaching languages, a way of creating stories with their students and building a different kind of classroom. They come with open hearts and open minds and they leave with smiles and warm memories and many new friends. That is the magic of Agen.