Mary Beth asked in a comment here last week about a possible actual first class scenario. The following series of posts provide one possibility. There are a lot of background posts before we even get to the description of what a first class should look like, but I don’t want to leave anything out and I feel it’s all necessary.
After the introductory posts we have detailed suggested “train tracks” for your first class. They are different from what I have done in years past, which focused too heavily on CWB. The suggestions can be changed in many ways, things omitted, things added, etc. There is no need to follow the plan rigidly.
The novice CI teacher is asked to toss out anything that doesn’t make immediate sense and focus only on the nuts and bolts of this possible way of teaching a first day class using CI.
It is the DNA of the process described below that you want to pay attention to, because it can be used in how you present every structure to your classes during the year – if it works with one verb, it can work with hundreds. This idea of “presenting structures” to the class is indeed a very important one. Why?
Presenting verbs and verbal structures is what I now believe to be the key aspect of our jobs. Verbs drive language and so instruction of verbs should drive our instruction. All of the other words are really incidental if you think about it. We certainly had a rich discussion on this topic talking about TPR, Verb Slam, etc. over the winter last year.