Elissa asked the group for help in planning a teacher training she has coming up soon. (We have a category for that now.) This is a response to Elissa from Chris Stolz in Canada. I really like the part of pushing the Movie Talk or what Chris calls the picturetalk aspect of this. I think he is referring to the use of interactive whiteboards (see that category) in the overall process of doing a demo on this method, because it is so impressive.
So here is Chris’ advice to Elissa outlining a training session for teachers:
1. Do your story in [some language that nobody knows]: awesome.
2. Immediately after, do movietalk and picturetalk on the same material/ structure as your story. REINFORCE [the story]!
3. Do your reading – make them embedded – also in [language that nobody knows]. Right after movietalk and picturetalk. REINFORCE!
4. In my experience, the ONLY way you are going to convince people of the ease and power of CI is through teaching them bits of another language. At my workshops teachers are ALWAYS amazed at how quickly – 90 mins – German acquisition goes (at end of demo, they are reading a 300-word story in 3 verb tenses including dialogue).
5. Email me if you want my slideshow. [ed. note: I will ask Chris for it and add it to the Power Point collection.] Blaine Ray’s is also available free on slideshare ed. note: does anyone have that link?]
6. See this for research summaries (thanks Eric Herman): http://tprsquestionsandanswers.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/the-research-supporting-comprehensible-input/
7. When done with your demo, once you start explaining the method, and you are doing examples, use the [language that nobody knows] they have acquired. Go slowly.
8. If you get them to practice, have a confident person who knows a REALLY foreign language (i.e. not Spanish or French) do circling or whatever in front of class (get them to teach two sentences– you always want 2 for contrast).
9. Don’t go overboard or theory/research, most people don’t care.