Here is Greg’s bio:
This is my second year of teaching and my second year teaching French at Northern High School in Durham, NC. I’m the only French teacher at my school so I teach all levels. This semester I’m teaching two combined classes (including level 2 through AP) and one class of French 1.
I took French all throughout high school and took a lot of classes in college, but never seriously considered teaching it. I majored in music (piano, and later, music education), did my student teaching in high school chorus, and got my certification in K-12 music. After spending a year trying to get a music teaching job I decided to apply for some French jobs and luckily my principal was crazy enough to offer me a job on the condition that I get my certification (she also hired 15 other first year teachers the same year, which gives her major cool points in my book).
Briefly, although it sure didn’t feel brief in coming, here is how I came to comprehensible input teaching:
At the start of this semester, I quickly realized that another semester of grammar Powerpoints and worksheets was not going to do it anymore. I found an old TPR Storytelling book in my room that came with my textbooks. It seemed like a neat idea, but the stories themselves seemed uber lame and I knew my kids wouldn’t buy into them. Basically, there’s a “story” for each lesson in the textbook that very artificially integrates every word and structure you’re supposed to teach. The teacher is supposed to tell the story before the lesson, using mime to get across the meaning of new vocab/structures. There is no student input, though. However, I liked the idea of teaching a language through stories.
So, I kept doing research and eventually found a video of a guy doing TPR commands for a whole class period with middle schoolers. This seemed neat, too. I tried it with my French 1 kids about 4 weeks into this semester and it went well for about 20 minutes until they got bored. It appeared that wasn’t going to work either. By a gracious stroke of good fortune, I somehow stumbled onto Ben’s blog and found out about creating stories WITH the kids and staying in the language the whole time. I bought Ben’s books and joined the PLC, then through reading the posts learned that stories are just one of many ways to teach through comprehensible input and also learned about Krashen’s work. It all made perfect sense to me and I was relieved beyond words to understand why the way I was teaching wasn’t working. My mind was blown to read all the comments on the PLC about people actually doing this stuff.
I scrapped the grammar over the weekend and took the plunge into TCI about two months ago now. I still have no clue what I’m doing and my classroom is still usually chaotic (I am literally shocked that I still have a job), but I believe 100% in my method now. Teaching through comprehensible input is the only thing that makes sense to me. I’m glad I didn’t land a music job two years ago and to have found this group.
Greg