Linda Li is in my view the only teacher I have seen who has mastered the skill of SLOW. It’s that rare to see a CI teacher speak slowly enough. There is even a term in the TPRS community to describe how slow is slow enough in a storytelling class, SLOW-LI (credit: Robert Harrell).
Linda’s Mandarin sessions at national conferences are always filled to capacity and often include Dr. Krashen in the audience and Linda of course includes Dr. Krashen in the story. They have a little routine worked out where Linda creates a super mini story in Mandarin around Dr. Krashen’s ubiquitous cup of coffee:
has
looks
wants
gives
[ed. note: Linda doesn’t work from a script when doing this demo. If she did, this is what it might look like, as taken from my notes at various conferences when she has done this story with Dr. Krashen. It is certainly what the reading created from the story would look like]:
Dr. Krashen has coffee. Marie (person in the class) looks at Dr. Krashen. Marie wants coffee. Dr. Krashen gives Marie coffee.
(Personally, I think that four is too many verbs for a first day class in Mandarin Chinese, but Linda pulls it off primarily because she spends the entire one and one half hour long session getting personalized reps on the four sentences above.)
The story begins with Dr. Krashen sitting there with his coffee.
Dr. Krashen has coffee. [ed. note: you could just give a student a Coke or something to make this work in your classroom.]
Linda is already in slow motion with a very happy, almost mischievous look on her face – one that signals the class that fun and laughter are going to be a part of the instruction. Targeting the first verb, she goes around the room asking questions like “Who has coffee?” etc.
Staying perfectly in bounds, Linda continues circling that first sentence. Everybody glances back and forth from her over to Dr. Krashen who just sits there with a contented look on his face holding a big cup of coffee from Starbucks. Linda, milking the image for repetitions, doesn’t rush to the next sentence. She hangs out with the image of Dr. Krashen sitting there. He basks in the attention.
People smile. They cannot help it. Something in the way Linda treats the image brings a kind of lightheartedness of instruction that we sometimes see in CI teachers. It’s not that funny; it’s just a man holding a cup of coffee. But the people continue to smile throughout the class. It’s because the teacher is happy about someone drinking coffee.
That is what sets Linda apart from the many of us – she takes joy in simple things while teaching. She is not so serious about her teaching, she’s not in a hurry to go anywhere with the story, and this validates something Dr. Krashen himself has said that is most important for all of us to keep in mind when we teach:
…in literacy and language development…only the path of pleasure works. Those who are committed to increasing student suffering (for whatever reason) or who are committed to self-flagellation, will be disappointed in the research results. The research, in my view, points strongly in the direction of the Pleasure Hypothesis: What is good for language development and literacy development is perceived to be pleasant by the acquirer and the teacher…. (Pleasure Reading, Young Learners SIG Spring Issue , 2006)
So the source of Linda’s CI magic is found in her sense of pleasure in teaching, in her appreciation of others and in the effortlessness that she brings to her teaching. Each quality has its foundations in SLOW. Without the slow speed of the instruction, the pleasure for the teacher and the students will not be there because their sense of being in touch with what is going on will be weak, the affective filter will raise, and the class will get clunky. That is how important SLOW is!
To repeat, and we need to repeat it because it is the single most important point of all in using stories to teach languages: it is in Linda’s sense of mysterious play and deep appreciation of simple things in a period of slowed down time that feels pleasurable to the members of the group that the language gains lie, even if the topic for over an hour is simply that of a man drinking a cup of coffee.
Having gotten sufficient reps on the first verb, sensing that the class is ready to move on, Linda starts doing the same process with the second sentence:
Marie looks at Dr. Krashen.
She circles this second sentence in the same slow and happy way as the first. As she does this, she turns and points to a pre-prepared posted list of all the words (question words, the word “has”, the word “coffee”, etc.) that she will use in the story. Each word of each sentence is thus made comprehensible with the laser pointer.
Linda is sure to bring others into the conversation. Do they have coffee? Who has coffee? What does Dr. Krashen have? Does (student in the class) have coffee or does Dr. Krashen have coffee? The class is focused on the message; Linda is focused on the verb. It doesn’t occur to her to go out of bounds because she is so focused on getting reps on the verb.
Next, when it is time (this is something we sense/feel rather than something we figure out with our minds when we teach using comprehensible input):
Marie wants coffee.
Linda circles that for a long time, but her pleasant demeanor, again, is what brings the interest in a way that one must see to fully appreciate. Since it is Chinese, every single person in the group – except Dr. Krashen, who has done this scene with Linda many times over the years – is inwardly yelling thank you for each repetition.
It’s true – we cannot get enough reps on the one word being circled. All teachers should be required to experience the difficulty of learning a language in this way when the teacher goes too fast without getting enough repetitions. It will make them go more slowly and get more reps on the targets.
Thus, we can say that Linda Li, by creating a pleasurable environment via slow and extremely simple sentences (Dr. Krashen has coffee, Marie looks at Dr. Krashen, Marie wants coffee.) is showing us slow simplicity that is both natural and enjoyable for those in her classes, as per:
…language acquisition is a natural and enjoyable process for anyone as long as the right kind of input is provided (Krashen, 1985)….
Once Linda had someone call her out of the room on some pretext and asked a fluent Mandarin speaker from a Chinese university who was already in the class to continue on with the same story. In on the joke, this teacher spoke to the group way so fast that the group looked like it was in a state of mild shock.
True of most students, for some reason the group of teachers felt as if they were supposed to be able to understand and that if they didn’t it was their fault and not that of the teacher. Students really don’t know any better; they think it’s their fault when they don’t understand. They then naturally assume that they are just not good at languages.
The history of language learning is littered with students who have quit their language learning careers far too early because ignorant teachers confused them daily in almost every school building in America, without taking responsibility for their own role in creating the confusion.
We should go five to ten times slower than we think we should, so that it hurts, and then we probably need to slow down some more. There is no reason to even begin to master comprehensible input based instruction unless one makes a firm commitment to try, at least, to teach as slowly as Linda Li.
Next:
Dr. Krashen gives Marie coffee.
The coffee goes to Marie’s hand via the group, which now has ownership in what is going on. Linda has spun a web of connectedness among the group with the coffee. She is now narrating a scene with actors. A series of simple images is in the process of being created in a very slow and very enjoyable way. That’s all there is to this work.
Once Marie has the coffee in her hand we experience a ton of repetitions on “gives”. As we hear the previous verbs that we absorbed unconsciously while focusing on the story, we still cannot get enough reps on them, and as we approach the end of the session our brains are as totally loaded up with new information as they can be.
At this point, all the verbs and all the other little words that have come to us as attachments that we weren’t aware of in the CI flow that Linda has given us are still on the desktop of our brains.
After we leave the class, we will notice a “din” of language in our minds. The four Chinese verbs will jump like bandits from our unconscious minds into our conscious minds and there is nothing we can do to control it. That is the sound of a new language system being built.
This din will come and go throughout the day and when we go to sleep it will all be arranged by the super computer that is the unconscious mind in a way that defies understanding. This is the “din in the head” theory proposed by Dr. Elizabeth Barber and Dr. Krashen (Barber 1980; Krashen 1981).
This dropping down into the hard drive and its processing during sleep is nothing short of a mystery. It is an infinitely complex language arrangement process that can only occur in the unconscious mind. However, if the deeper mind is not given enough comprehensible input in the way we see when Linda teaches in this way, no language can be acquired.
That’s it. Almost two hours have gone by in pleasant harmony, a harmony that defines Linda’s own teaching style and that we would do well to try to emulate. There here has not been a single word of English in this class except the visual translation input from the charts behind Linda. English translation has required less than 2% of the instructional minutes that Linda had available to her at the start of class.
So also should our story scripts be simple enough to allow us to go slowly. We should never want to “finish the story”. That is not our students need. It is better to finish only one sentence of a story in a class period than to try to finish the story. We are teaching languages, not stories, which are merely vehicles.
Those who want to start the year with the best comprehensible input may want to consider using Linda’s story above as our own first story. If we go slowly enough and enforce the rules at every turn, we will have a fantastic experience with trained kids who know and like each other, where interesting things are said, with 98% of the class happening in the target language.
We will thus learn to enjoy our jobs, and our students will effortlessly acquire, just by focusing on the message, because they want to.