CI is a very simple thing, but it requires that the teacher completely shift their teaching to appeal to the unconscious minds of the students. This is a big shift and not easy for the teacher who still thinks that their students can reason their way to mastery of a language.
To our credit, we in this PLC have developed techniques over the years that describe how to make that shift to unconscious and hence real acquisition. However, those techniques, listed in the form of acronyms and described in the Big Ideas category here on this site, are no more easy to master than learning how to play the violin from reading articles on a website.
In an effort to simplify the process of teaching using comprehensible input for PLC members who are new to the method, in this post I will try to extract the process from the acronyms. The truth is that each technique we use, from PQA to stories to Reader’s Theatre to Movie Talk and all the other confusing (if you haven’t been to a conference) ways we use on this PLC to describe TPRS/CI instruction, there is an underlying sequence of simple and common things that we do that makes it all work. Here is one attempt to describe that sequence:
First we take a structure from the L2 (in the case of stories we take two or three). We just get a structure. Our mindset should be, “That structure is my total focus for the rest of this class or until it loses energy. It’s really all I want to teach today.”
That is called our target structure. It is the only focus of the lesson until we feel the “kathunk” in the class that the students have command over it. This takes much longer than we think, and so we must be prepared to teach that structure over and over and over, by placing it fully in the context of the language during the class.
However, many teachers make three massive mistakes in class. Here is the first:
Instead of teaching the structure, they get sidetracked by the other words they are using and fail to include the structure or structures in every single sentence (question or statement) that they say to the class. That brings chaos, since the students, who are listening for their “friend” (the structure) in the mix of all the other words, are disappointed not to hear it and they lose their interest with each passing second as their “friend” is not there for them.
As a result, teachers who do not include the target structure in each sentence they say tend to “lose” their students, sometimes completely, and then they say that the method doesn’t work and they go back to the book, which is the wrong thing to do.
[It is most important to note here that, ostensibly, every single word that the teacher is using has already been acquired by the students, in previous lessons. However, that is impossible. Therefore, the teacher is urged to try their best to severely limit the amount of new words allowed in. This means that there should be no more than a handful (three or four) of new expressions presented in each lesson. The ideal lesson ends with no new words on the board. When I described the Point and Pause skill in TPRS in a Year!, I was not aware of that point and so that point in the book is misleading. It is NOT OK to flit from new structure to new structure, from flower to flower, when doing comprehensible input.]
Next, we tell the students what the structure means by writing it in both languages on the board, using English to explain it. So, if we are doing CWB, and we learn from looking at a student’s card that they have a cat (sometimes we include pets on the CWB cards besides something they like to do) and we write on the board (I’m using French in this example):
a des chats = has cats
and, after pronouncing it for them (“ahh”), we then (this is just what I do) say, “Class, ‘a des chats’ means ‘has cats’ in French. What does ‘a es chats’ mean in French? (‘has’). Class, how do you say “has cats” in French? (‘a’). That’s right, class, ‘a des chats’ means ‘has cats’ in French.
“Class (I always say “class” like that because it seems to bring the class together), is there a way that we can remember that ‘a des chats’ means ‘has cats’ in French?” At this point, if somebody has a mnemonic or some other device to remember it, they offer it and I praise their idea. If they can’t think of one, we go on. I can’t think of one for ‘has’ as I write this, but an example is that if I were teaching “car” in French (“voiture”), a good word association is, “What year (voiture) is your Toyota?” The kids like to do that and they are amazingly clever at it.
But those word associations don’t really work. They don’t really lead to acquisition and are soon forgotten. Then why do them? For two reasons:
1. it gets the kids focused on the word.
2. it give me a chance to praise the kids who offer ideas, thus building a feeling of camaraderie with the group as we work toward a common goal, all of us working together, instead of me trying to “teach them something”. It sets up the class emotionally to work together.
All of the above just takes a few minutes and is known in TPRS/CI methodology as the first part of Step 1 of TPRS – establishing meaning.
Then the second part of Step 1 of TPRS happens – the part called PQA when we just talk to and about the kids in a relaxed way. But this is where many teachers get lost as described above, because they don’t target and stay on only one structure and include it at least once in every single thing that they say.
[Note importantly that the children cannot handle more than the one new sound at a time. You couldn’t either, if you were in your own class. It is because second language learners don’t have all the time that first language learners have, years and years of 24/7 exposure so that the sound “has” occurs hundreds of thousands of times in meaningful context in L1 but, since we are so limited in time, we have to say the word “has” in every sentence in a deliberate way in class, and we still don’t have enough time – not even close – which teaches us humility and not to drive ourselves so hard to teach the language in four years to a select group of kids, which is a good formula for teacher burnout. The sound “has” in French is my only focus for that class, and just do the best I can to get as many reps on it as I can.]
We use the basic bread and butter technique of Circling in the discussion we start around the target structure. (I won’t give examples of how to circle a structure here but for the complete novice who has not been to a conference you must learn how to circle – there are articles here and in different books or just go to a conference).
After awhile, if you are doing PQA with CWB cards, you can just go to a kid’s card once the energy runs out of the structure you were working on previously. And then, once you have talked about the second kid long enough so that you feel that the class understands it well, you can go to a third kid, or, better yet, you can compare the first kid’s “has cats” with the second kids structure, or you can make up a little scene (I call this “extending PQA”) and just learn to trust the flow of things, always remembering to include one of the established target structures in every sentence.
If you are not doing CWB or general PQA but are instead using the structures from a story and following a story script, you can at that point go right into the story (Step 2 of TPRS), in which you personalize via underlined variables (Anne Matava does wonderfully in her scripts) and then do a reading (Step 3 of TPRS).
Now, to return to an earlier point, I said that there are three massive mistakes made by the teacher new to the method, and we have discussed the first one above – failure to include the target structure in every single utterance.
Here is the second mistake, and it’s a doozy: the teacher fails to speak slowly enough. They just go too fast. They forget that their students don’t know the language. The teacher needs to cultivate a heart attitude of respect for their students, maybe by mentally placing themselves in the desks in their own classroom during class, and slow down.
That’s all there is to say on that point. Among experienced TPRS/CI teachers who claim to know the method, I would not be surprised if 98% go too fast. I certainly do. Bob Patrick doesn’t. The article referenced here two days ago shows Bob going nice and slowly in Latin, but even in those videos, and I think he would agree, if he sped up even slightly it would be too fast:
https://benslavic.com/blog/article-and-video
Here is the third mistake, also a doozy: the teacher fails to make the discussion about the kids. They don’t realize the supreme importance of making the discussion about how Beyoncé also has cats but her cats are ugly and the student’s cats are the most beautiful cats in the world.
So watch out and try to avoid the mistakes described above, by remembering in each class to:
1. include the target in every utterance
2. stay SLOW
3. personalize
