Thursday, June 18, 2015

CI/TPRS Professional Development

Many times, I am asked about what workshops should people attend to learn about CI/TPRS. Below is a list of workshops/conference which I recommend:

A 2-day Blaine Ray TPRS workshop - although one can attend a CI/TPRS presentation at a conference, personally I think to learn truly about CI/TPRS, one needs to attend a 2-day Blaine Ray TPRS workshop. During these two days, you will experience learning another language as a student using CI/TPRS and will learn about TPRS (the basics of Comprehensible Input, circling, asking a story, etc), as well as spend time practicing TPRS, while being coached. In the summer of 2008, I attended a 2-day TPRS workshop led by Blaine Ray himself, where he demonstrated TPRS in German. I was amazed at how much i was comprehending when Blaine was teaching the lesson (and I was not even aware what he was deliberately doing) and how at the end I was able to produce a bit of German based purely on that one lesson from just hearing and interacting with the language. It was at that point I knew that Comprehensible Input worked!

NTPRS - the National TPRS Conference is a weeklong, summer conference dedicated to CI/TPRS. I attended my first NTPRS conference last summer, and it was incredible! You can read my blog post here. In fact, this summer, I will be giving two presentations at NTPRS! 

IFLT - the International Forum on Language Teaching (IFLT) conference is hosted by TPRS Publishing and is much like NTPRS in that it is also dedicated to CI/TPRS. The major difference though is that much of the time is devoted to observing master CI/TPRS teachers actually teaching students, so you will get to see it in action!  A few years ago, I had the opportunity to observe Karen Rowan teach a Spanish class, and it was absolutely amazing. My goal is to attend my first IFLT in the summer of 2016.

TCI Maine, New England and Beyond - This is a 2-day workshop hdedicated to teaching CI/TPRS held in the fall in the New England area.

As I said before, one can learn about CI/TPRS through blogs,Twitter chats, listservs, and videos, but I would recommend experiencing it truly as if you were a student with a language which you do not know. Once you see first hand how it works, you will want to learn more!  

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