TPRS Workshop in Shimabara, Kyushu – part deux
Had my first full day of Oral English university classes today (all non-English majors) and discovered some more benefits from the TPRS workshop I attended last weekend in Kyushu, Japan. Here’s the short version: no prep! Increased confidence. Sticking to the program of events. Didn’t circle every sentence. Insisting on absolute quiet and attention during [...]
TPRS Workshop in Shimabara, Kyushu
A TPRS workshop for language teachers was held in Shimabara, Kyushu, Sep. 18-20. The workshop leader was Susan Gross, a retired teacher of French and Spanish in Colorado high schools, and an experienced workshop leader. There was an interpreter, Yuki Watanabe, who translated everything into Japanese, and did an excellent job. How did I hear [...]
Can role-play help fluency?
In The Language Teacher, March/April 2010′s “Readers’ Forum”, Eric Bray writes about role-play in EFL (PDF, login and password required) (the TLT homepage mistakenly attributes the article): Unlike more controlled language learning activities, roleplays [sic] are tasks which fall towards the freer end of the language learning activity continuum discussed by Nunan (2004) and Richards [...]
TPRS Workshop in Nagasaki! – Cancelled
Image via Wikipedia Update: This workshop has been cancelled. There will be a 3-day TPRS workshop in Shimbara, Nagasaki, Jan. 15-17. The workshop will be in English with interpretation in Japanese. The workshop will be led by Susan Gross, a TPRS veteran (Ben Slavic mentions her constantly on his blog as his inspiration and teacher), [...]
Keeping track
Image via Wikipedia All new vocab goes on the board. I don’t care if everyone in the class understands and recognizes the item except one person; for that one person, it goes on the board (and I’m sure at least one other person is grateful). I very quickly ran out of room on the board, [...]
Hit one out of the park
Image by A-Wix via Flickr Ben Slavic wrote: Then, one day, we may hit one out of the park, and then overhear a kid walk out of class and say, “French is cool!” and we realize that all of the struggle is worth it, that we are doing things in our classrooms that we have [...]
Fluency in writing – what is it? How do you “teach” it?
Fluency in writing? What does that mean? How do you teach it? Some problems I face teaching writing at university here in Japan are a) a big spread of ability amongst students (some cannot put a sentence together, indeed have no idea what a “sentence” is, while others are nearly fluent) b) (partly a result [...]
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 [...]
TPRS – how to develop fluency in EFL students by storytelling
Image by Pratham Books via Flickr My college EFL students were not improving in either confidence or fluency. Worse, some who’d been paying attention were tuning out, and the ones that had tuned out already were not tuning back in. It was time for a change. But to what? Listening to AJ’s materials, I’d started [...]
TPRS
Image by …storrao… via Flickr I am reading everything I can find about TPRS. I recently got Blaine Ray‘s Fluency Through TPR Storytelling, and have been reading it each night until I fall asleep. Today, I got hooked on Ben Slavic’s page. Yesterday, I downloaded all the handouts, docs, posters, everything that wasn’t nailed down. [...]
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