La prof caféin​ée (the caffeinated teacher) is my blog devoted to teaching and learning. Here are excerpts from a few of my favorite posts.
​

If there is one complaint that organically arises from a shift away from “culture Fridays” and towards authentic language use (90% plus, thankyouverymuch), it is this one.  I can’t possibly teach culture to my novices if I can’t do it in English, right?
As you may have guessed from the fact that I cared enough to write a blog post about it, my answer is an unequivocal NO.
The 3 Ps

While I can imagine my students doing lots of different things with the language they are acquiring, I can guarantee that very few of those things would definitely happen. They might never order in a French restaurant, or buy clothes in Senegal, or give directions...
But I can guarantee that every student in my class will, at some point, need a word to express themselves that they do not have.
Circumlocution, or “That thing that you wear on your head”

There are so many nuances, so many different rules, and so many knowledge gaps in teachers’ experiences that a truly accurate picture of the entire francophone world is virtually out of reach.  But to refuse to begin is to fail, and we can do better than that.  We can start by identifying common cultural misunderstandings that our students often carry around and creating opportunities to confront them in a productive way.
Intercultural competence

We teach grammar at two times: When students need it, and when students are ready for it.  If they need it, but they’re not ready for it, we give it to them as chunks of vocabulary.
Are you shocked?  You shouldn’t be; you probably already do this.  We teach “I would like” (conditional) in our level 1 food units all the time without explaining what the construct is.  In French, I teach “Il y a” (there is) without explaining pronoun order or expecting my students to grasp all idiomatic expressions.  We just haven’t expanded our definitions of when this is acceptable beyond what we were told we could do when we started teaching.
The miracle that is the PACE lesson