On a social media site, a general question more or less like this has been flying around of late: Why can’t we just look at our students and gauge them that way? Why do they need to actually respond? I can already tell if they are listening and interested. The answer goes back to the […]
Archive for November, 2016
The need to ask
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 26th, 2016
Posted in Drift / Is This TPRS?, Methods, Speaking/Listening 
Tags: comprehension checks 
Comments Off on The need to askCI with Local Characteristics
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 22nd, 2016
So, you believe that language is acquired through comprehensible input — repeated matching of incoming sounds (or what looks to my ignorant non-signing eyes like hand-waving, in the case of ASL) and meaning by the wonderful, ever-working brain. So every technique based on comprehensible input should work for everyone, right? Since that is a language […]
Posted in Drift / Is This TPRS?, Methods Tags: storyasking, storytelling, teacher centered Comments Off on CI with Local CharacteristicsCold Character Reading: Conditions for Success
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 20th, 2016
Cold Character Reading is very simple in theory: get some oral language into the students’ heads, then have them directly jump to reading that same language (but a story or text they have never seen or heard before, not something they already know the meaning of) using a non-phonetic writing system like Chinese characters, or […]
Posted in Chinese-specific, Reading Tags: CCR, opaque script, the Voice Comments Off on Cold Character Reading: Conditions for SuccessTPRS: The Gateway Method
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 14th, 2016
PQA. La Personal Especial. Comprehensible content-based teaching. One-word images. MovieTalk. Quiz time: what one method encompasses all of them? TPRS. Many people come around to Teaching with Comprehensible Input and want to start with something other than TPRS. They like MovieTalk. They just want to do La Personal Especial. They don’t want to do storytelling. […]
Why literal translation doesn’t do it
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 11th, 2016
The question was recently raised on a teachers’ list Is word-for-word translation (“glossing”) or translation into natural English “better” in the TPRS classroom? (This translation being referred to is for comprehension checks; no one is talking about having kids translate long passages of text in writing.) This kind of “translation” is intended as a quick […]
Posted in Methods Tags: comprehension check, glossing, translation Comments Off on Why literal translation doesn’t do it