Timed writing
Blaine Ray wrote,
Having [students] do time writings without editing is an excellent way to assess fluency.
I’ve been having my students write for 5 minutes almost every class, usually at the beginning, sometimes at the end. Sometimes I set the topic, but most times I left them free to write whatever they wanted. I had them [...]
TPRS Workshop in Nagasaki! – Cancelled
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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), and Melinda [...]
Keeping track
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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, but I [...]
What does dictation evaluate?
I have a question about dictation. I’ve been looking at various rubrics that Susie Gross and Jason Fritze have created to evaluate students, and I wanted to come up with my own that I could show to my department colleagues. I want to win them over to the idea of making fluency the main objective [...]
Read more »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 never been [...]
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 of a) above) [...]
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 even really [...]
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 thinking about [...]
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