It's here! I have been working on this book for a year and a half, (well, actually, my whole career). And it's finally done. This is the best of what I teach teachers. It is some of the best work I have ever written, a distillation of all my [...]
This is the perfect unit for when the teacher is out of the classroom for a few days: It delivers comprehensible input, it gives students a concrete task, it is multi-level, and the accountability is built in. Plus, the sub doesn't need to know the language or how to [...]
This just-published unit can be the first full story of the school year for a Spanish I class. It can be told at the beginning of the second or third week of class, or it can be saved until later. It explains how to get students reading right away. [...]
Asking students a series of purposeful questions and follow-up questions supercharges learning. It engages them and drives acquisition of language and complex ideas like nothing else. Plato modeled this technique brilliantly in Socrates’ dialogues. Special Person student interviews are similar to Socratic teaching. It is asking questions with a [...]
Talking about things that matter is the goal of language teaching. One thing that matters is SCIENCE. CÓMO LO SABÍAN Excerpt is a chapter from my best-selling book Conexiones: Making Connections with the Spanish-Speaking World. This article explains in simple Spanish how ancient peoples all around the world (pun [...]
Here is an idea that will work if your curriculum demands you explicitly teach direct object pronouns: tell an interesting story that requires DOP's. Here's the outline of one that will work: Somebody sees something that another person doesn’t and they both get frustrated. It would be even better [...]