How comprehensible must comprehensible input be?
According to Krashen, for language-learning to occur, language input must be comprehensible. I’m teaching a class of university freshmen, in an English Dept. Some of them learned absolutely no English in high school. Some seem to have learned nothing in JHS. Some do not recognize the word “young”. One boy said he doesn’t understand “does” [...]
Classroom management – how to nip potential troublemakers in the bud (2)
Re-arrange the furniture Assign seats Assign bell-work. Coming up with good bell-work (work that actually engages them and keeps them quiet yet productively busy) is difficult. Problems: Today’s bell-work was not so hot. I was so busy photocopying and cutting and pasting (literally, not digitally) to prepare for today’s classes (which run back-to-back with just [...]
TPRS Workshop with Susan Gross in Shimabara, Japan, Sep. 2011
A three day teaching skills workshop for teachers of foreign languages, held in Shimabara, Japan. We welcome any teachers, regardless of where and at which level they teach, and seek to build a forum for shared and co-operative skill improvement. An English – Japanese interpreter will be present for all sessions. More info on [...]
Automatic Language Growth – a variant of Krashen’s Natural Approach
Jack Taylor, a young teacher of English in Japan and creator and manager of the Japan TPRS forum, alerted me to the work of Dr. J. Marvin Brown who created the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) (earlier called the Listening Approach), a variant of Krashen and Terrell’s Natural Approach. Dr. Brown developed his ideas over many years [...]
Final exams
How do you assess your students’ fluency in English? Do you give final exams? I do. But I notice that this semester, I’ve done things a little differently from last semester. What is different and why?
How to maximize comprehensible input using songs
You know how to use songs in class: grab the lyrics off the Internet and paste into a Word document. Go through the said Word doc and replace every nth word with an underlined blank. Save and photocopy. Make sure you’ve got the original song on CD or iPod, and walk into classroom. Bingo. That’s about [...]
Tools for Teaching 2
Having had my first day of teaching since beginning to read Fred Jones’ “Tools for Teaching”, I can now give you a preliminary report. I know you’ve all been dying to hear about it, so here it is. I had 4 classes today, 3 of which are pretty draining. I used the following ideas from Fred [...]
Tools for Teaching
Fred Jones Tools for Teaching: Discipline-Instruction-Motivation by Fred Jones is proving to be one of those books that soon gets me pulling out my pen and note cards – not to record things I want to rememberfrom the book , but to write down new ideas I’m getting as I read it. Here’s an example: in [...]
Teaching a foreign language at university level using TPRS
Image via Wikipedia Do you teach a foreign or second language at university? Is fluency a key goal of yours? Are you using TPRS, or some similar approach? If so, you might be interested in what I’ve written below, and I’d be interested in reading your comments. Every teacher who attempts to use TPRS must [...]
A month on TPRS
Well, almost a month. Time to take stock. What’s happened? Today, I taught two classes of EFL, both without a textbook and in one I used a song. For the rest of the time, it was just me talking and asking simple questions, using information supplied by the students themselves. TPRS works. And I haven’t [...]
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