Classroom Management
Classroom Strategies
Classroom Strategies
Fluency Writing
My students played the game quite honestly, and once they realized that I was more interested in reading what they had to say than in counting spelling mistakes, many of them trusted me by writing very personal and interesting texts.
Classroom Strategies
Corrections are No Longer Drudgery
Writing is output, but when I edit their texts and give them to other students to read, it becomes input. and compelling input at that.
Classroom Strategies
Very Narrow Listening
I often feel that we do not devote enough attention to listening, whereas it is obviously an important skill if we are expecting our students to acquire a language through comprehensible input. Perhaps the most important skill of all.
Classroom Strategies
Why I no longer teach Phonics
Teaching phonics means concentrating on form and it only goes into short term memory , which basically means a lot of time and energy spent on very little gain. As Stephen Krashen says, “There’s an easy way and there’s a hard way. And the hard way doesn’t work.”
Classroom Strategies
Fluency Writing
Through my comments I wanted my students to know that I was reading what they wrote, reading it for content, not for grammatical correctness, that I was truly interested in what they had to say.
Classroom Strategies
Circling
Circling can be used by all teachers, with any method, to make their lessons more effective and to help students acquire new vocabulary and new grammatical structures. Susan Gross, a French teacher in Colorado, developed developed the technique into a fine art in order to give her students repetitive comprehensible input while keeping them engaged
Classroom Management
When Mistakes are not Mistakes.
An Englishman in a French restaurant: Serveur! Il y a un mouche dans la soupe!
Waiter: C’est une mouche, monsieur.
Englishman: Blimey! You’ve got good eyes.
Classroom Management
Musing after class
I then realized that the “difficult words” that the Americans struggled with were the very words that made the text easy for my students because they were cognates for French speakers.
Classroom Strategies
L’oral d’anglais au bac
“all they need to do is to memorize four questions. The day of the interview they answer the four questions. This gives their presentation structure and a safety net for those moments of panic when their mind goes blank.”