Training and Professional Development Options

CI in Short

After a reader had slogged through a 28-page forum discussion on Comprehensible Input-based language teaching, the question came out: Could someone post a very brief, 3- or 4- point summary of the basics? This is my take on that. Comprehensible Input: the brain acquires language by hearing language it can understand. It takes many repetitions for the brain to acquire new words, and many more repetitions for it to master and internalize a new structure (“grammar pattern”) so it can...

Comprehensible Input goes traveling

The newest buzz in the communicative language teaching community is — guess what — “Comprehensible Input”. Unfortunately, there seems to be some confusion about what “comprehensible” means. Sitting in workshops given by respected presenters in the communicative teaching world, one hears repeated references to “Comprehensible Input”, but what is really being said is usually one of the following: 1. Use gestures/pictures to “introduce vocabulary”. Never translate. Translation is Bad. 2. Have learners deal with some sort of input (in writing...

Comprehensible input and acquired output

A TPRS teacher recently wrote: I know we’re not about writing because it’s output but not input, but maybe this kind of thing would help the kids see the value in paying attention to those stories in class, and give them a chance to see that there are thousands of kids who are being taught this same way. This is sort of scary to me. It’s certainly true that TPRS isn’t primarily about output. We do not believe that language...

What exactly is Comprehensible Input? Does it mean “just getting the student to understand pretty much what’s going on, enough to get the point of what’s being said”? That is not the type of CI that is most effective in language acquisition — because if it were, immersion programs would work. Spring Series – Part I: March – April 2012 Maintaining Target Language in the Classroom: Comprehensible Input and Output The ACTFL Position Statement on the use of the target...

Fluency in Reading

The fluent reader is “one whose decoding processes are automatic, requiring no conscious attention.” (LaBerge and Samuels 1974) How fluent are the readers in your FL class? What do they need BEFORE they can be fluent readers? They need language. And they need to have acquired it, not just feel like maybe they’ve heard that word somewhere before. You can’t automatically decode what you haven’t acquired. In the 21st century rush to teach more faster to younger students, the ideas...

Short Thought

Fluency is being able to use all the language you’ve acquired unconsciously and correctly. Proficiency is being able to do that and also having enough vocabulary to make things happen in the world.

But TPRS is so unstructured!

On a discussion board talking about learning Chinese, the comment was recently posted: It was only after I’d been learning Chinese for a while and had acquired most of the grammar structures that I felt comfortable learning Chinese in a non-structured way. This statement seems logical on the surface. After all, you have to “learn” the language first, before you can benefit from those loose, random interactions in the environment, right? The problem in this quote for me lies in...

ACTFL, why stop at the sentence level?

The new ACTFL proficiency guidelines are out for 2012. But they are still based on the outcomes from traditional rules-and-output language teaching. Yes, they aren’t referencing specific grammar points, which is a definite plus. And the requirements or wiggle room for errors is, in my view, appropriate across the levels. What I have a problem with is not expecting learners to use the language at more than the sentence level until the Advanced level. Huh??!? A TPRS-taught learner is easily...

Question Words and More

Posting the question words on the wall in plain view, with their native/shared language translations, is pretty much standard practice in TPRS, and for good reason: these words are used frequently in the TPRS classroom, as we circle, and without an immediate aid to establish meaning for them, the efficient circling of new items through questions in a way that immediately produces understanding would not be possible. I’m not the first one to point this out, but it can also...

Tagging for acquisition

We can’t see exactly how the brain works its magic in generalizing from many examples to just knowing what structure to automatically use to express a meaning it has never tried to express before — which is what fluent speakers can do. What if we think of it in terms of tagging? It’s sort of like the man in the brain has to tag each structure that comes in, but to tag the structure — to sort of label what...