Jen is this the article? I don’t think it is. I’ll keep looking.
Here are some talking points you might consider using during a job interview:
(1) I teach language using a methodology based on the research of Dr. Stephen Krashen on language acquisition, in particular his Comprehensible Input Theory, which states that people acquire language only when they are attending to compelling comprehensible input. This idea was revolutionary to me. It means that output activities, such as speaking and writing, do not in themselves facilitate acquisition; rather, students will only acquire when they are listening or reading. Furthermore, a “sink or swim” immersion model does not particularly facilitate acquisition, as the input needs to be comprehensible to the student.
(2) Teaching in this way has been for me among the most fruitful and joyful of my career. If I were made to teach without basing my instruction on Krashen’s hypotheses, I might as well just say right now that I wouldn’t do it. Although the content varies according to the interests and abilities of the students, most of what we do in class now is to create, embellish, read, and retell narratives of various types.
(3) Gifted students quickly achieve a high level of proficiency. Students who face academic challenges in other subjects are happy to be in a class where the learning is natural, almost effortless, except for the discipline of adhering to the classroom protocol.
(4) The communication standards are harmonious with this more natural approach to language instruction. My past administrators, having been in my classroom and in full support of my work, have granted me a good deal of latitude to determine which standards to emphasize and at which point in the sequence.
(5) There has been general agreement that thematic units of study and predetermined precise learning targets are not supportive of, and can in fact be antithetical to, the more organic, student-driven process which is teaching using comprehensible input.
(6) In lieu of units of study and a sequential curriculum, I ask questions about my students’ drawings to start the year. With this information, I am able to begin right away talking with the students in French about themselves, their interests, their hobbies, the characters that they love to create, etc. We base a lot of our instruction on images, and kids really like that.
(7) For a while I had posted on the wall next to my desk a list of the 200 most frequently-used words in the French language, and took great care to incorporate those into my teaching. Eventually I realized that when I talked with the students every day in French about their lives, and when we built stories together that all of us found interesting and engaging, sooner or later we used all of those high-frequency words. I still have the list, but now I just refer to it from time to time as a way of assessing my own practice. In truth, students easily and naturally acquire high-frequency structures without lists.