In the Denver Public Schools what we do is work backwards from novels. We make a list of the verbs that are necessary to read a certain novel, teach those verbs using the the various comprehensible input skills that we have, and then read the novel, which because of all the work spent teaching the verbs, is easy.
My own problem with that is that there are too many verbs in the novels for that not to be a really long process. It takes a long time to prepare all those verbs. There are few really simple novels out there available for our students to read. Carol Gaab’s Brandon Wants a Dog is at the lead of the pack in that race, but I will leave that topic of which chapter books are best to read – at what point in time – out of the current discussion. That list is changing all the time as new really simple books come out.
People who doubt the power of CI instruction, who haven’t seen its ability to bring concrete language gains to students in ways that current traditional methods of testing cannot match (since they are based on memorization), might be interested to read what happened in the Denver Public Schools in the 2014-2015 school year.
By 2014, about 80 of the 100 DPS WL teachers were doing full-on CI instruction (vs. only 5 of 100 in 2009). In August of 2014, Diana Noonan, the DPS WL coordinator, gave the DPS WL Scope and Sequence (a big list of verbal structures) to all the teachers. When the teachers asked what to teach, expecting to be given a complex set of impossible tasks that cracked the language into many little pieces, they were given that list of verbs.
The teachers who employed CI instruction to meet that challenge all ended up teaching their students by February of that year essentially the same verbs – about 35 of them, according to Diana, who spends most of her time in classrooms, observing and talking to teachers.
(Yes, DPS has a WL coordinator who spends vast amounts of time in teachers’ classrooms and spends most of her budget on substitutes so that teachers in DPS are constantly observing each other in formal training sessions with pre-briefs and observations and post-briefs lasting usually four hours long.)
This was not a formal study, but we believe that the fact that there was no order that Diana told the teachers to present the verbs in, but that they had all presented and gotten massive reps on the same 35 verbs by February, is still a significant field observation.