The Countdown
As the school year quickly winds down, I can’t help but look forward to the next one with much anticipation and excitement. Yeah, it sounds crazy I know, because so many of us are beyond exhausted, expending our energy to motivate apathetic students who have been bitten by the Spring Fever bug and the Senior Slide virus.
While I would argue that these last few weeks are the busiest and the most stressful of the entire school year, I do find them to be inordinately stimulating. My mind thrusts into creativity mode, and unleashes fresh ideas pertaining to lesson plans, classroom design and behavior management strategies that I may want to try during the upcoming school year.
From the time I awake until the moment that sleep steals me away for the evening my brain is inundated with vivid images, so I carry a notepad around to help me organize my thoughts. During the summer break, I will reflect and research them further.
This summer, my reflection will focus primarily on Comprehensible Input and more specifically, how I can create an optimal learning environment where I can deliver quality instruction using CI techniques and strategies.
The Journey
The year was 1995 when I secured my first teaching assignment. (Some of you reading this may not have even been born yet!) Back in those colonial days of world language education my students were learning from an antiquated McGraw Hill textbook complete with a plethora of drab illustrations and an even larger dosage of mechanical vocabulary and grammar exercises.
I clung tightly to that textbook format – a) because that’s what the veteran teachers in my department had been doing, and – b) because it was somewhat comforting, since it had been the way I had learned language when I was a secondary student. Furthermore, this was the model for instruction during my student teaching practicum.
By my third year of teaching I concluded that there must be a better way to deliver instruction. As an educator, I was bored and I sensed from the dozens of empty expressions staring back at me that my students were equally disinterested. Moreover, I wasn’t speaking as much Spanish in my classes as I had initially anticipated I would, so I decided that it was time to conduct some experiments of my own.
First, I reordered the textbook chapters and themes, then I created my own activities to reinforce language and finally, I delivered instruction mostly in Spanish. What ensued was complete exhaustion and utter frustration. Day after day I dramatized vocabulary terms in my one woman show, or at least I tried. Students gawked, laughed, made silly jokes and guessed vocabulary terms and phrases, as if we were playing a friendly game of charades.
In addition, we played a variety of games like Concentration, Pictionary and Jeopardy, plus we watched Spanish-speaking news clips that I had recorded on my VCR from Univisión and Telemundo, which were the only two Spanish language cable networks at the time.
I even printed articles and weather reports from Spanish-speaking newspapers that were available on the Internet. Geomundo, the monthly Spanish language version of National Geographic Magazine, and the Sunday edition of El Nuevo Dia, the Puerto Rican newspaper out of San Juan, regularly arrived at my home, which I would then share with my students.
I had no direction and no idea if what I was doing would work, but I knew deep in my heart that there indeed existed a better way for students to acquire a second language.
I developed the idea that if I couldn’t take students to learn first hand about the language and culture of the Spanish-speaking world, then I would bring that world into my classroom, as best I could.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Internet was still in its infancy stages. Only a small fraction of what we have available to us today was available back then, and trying to locate those items was daunting. I spent hours each day surfing the Super Highway and never really knowing where I was heading. Plus, in those early days, there was an hourly charge to use the Internet, so the bills added up rather quickly.
Today we have the convenience of conducting Google searches on any topic one can think of and the results turn up page after page of resources. This wasn’t the case in the 1990’s. I couldn’t just search for popular world language methodologies, nor could I connect with the very people who would pioneer Comprehensible Input. Like so many other teachers of that era, I was isolated in my classroom conducting experiments on my student guinea pigs.
Though in constant bewilderment, I genuinely felt that my method of delivering instruction; speaking the target language and utilizing authentic resources, held more intrinsic value than any bland textbook ever could. The dilemma was to figure out how to create and deliver such instruction so it could be measurable in an efficient and systematic manner.
The A-HA Moment
When that school year finally came to an end, so did my three and a half year stint teaching high school Spanish. The next nine year adventure would have me writing elementary Spanish curriculum and teaching elementary students. It would be during this new chapter of my life when I would have my A-HA moment, when I would truly learn how to deliver instruction well.
Breaking concepts down into their simplest form and then building them up as students become proficient is at the heart of elementary teaching and learning. Structuring every minute of the period is essential for on-task behavior and student success. Dividing the lesson period into ten or fifteen-minute blocks, incorporating songs, games and physical activities maintains the interest of young children while simultaneously reinforcing important concepts.
This is exactly what I was trying to accomplish during my last year of teaching high school and it’s what I never learned in my education classes nor in the few months that I spent as a student teacher. It made total sense to me. But the best part of it all was that it was done completely in the target language and without a textbook!
By the end of my elementary era, I was a much more confident teacher and I understood how children acquire language best because I witnessed it in action. I often commented to colleagues that if I were to return to the secondary classroom, I’d be a much more effective teacher. I also developed the belief that every secondary teacher ought to spend part of their student teaching practicum in an elementary classroom.
Ultimately, the grueling schedule of traveling between multiple schools teaching up to twelve classes per day, which is nothing compared to many elementary world language teachers, working from a cart and having no classroom to call home wore me down. It was time to move on and middle school would be my next stop.
Growing Pains
I arrived at middle school well prepared and ready to go. A textbook was required, which at first, did NOT excite me. However, after exploring Vista Higher Learning’s textbooks, I was pleasantly surprised by all of their bells and whistles. Since I had not even looked at a textbook in nearly a decade, I didn’t realize the degree to which technology would or could impact learning a world language.
My fifth grade curriculum resembled what I had done previously with elementary students, while my sixth grade curriculum focused on history, geography and culture of Spanish-speaking countries and it was taught primarily in English. It was the seventh and eighth grade curricula for which I created a hybrid teaching method, combining the text and its tools with the elementary teaching style that I had developed.
It seemed to work because by the time my students reached the end of eighth grade, they could carry on a conversation in Spanish with me and their peers for an entire forty-five minute class period. Granted, it was all in the present tense, but keep in mind that we had to follow the textbook scope and sequence and I had never been formally trained in CI techniques, which would have allowed us to be much more flexible with grammar.
I won’t lie to you. I felt pretty good about this. Afterall, my high school students couldn’t carry on a conversation after taking a year of Spanish classes, so it seemed to me that I was right on track with language instruction.
After eight years of teaching middle school, I tried my hand at the college level, first as an adjunct in a local community college, where once again, I was required to use a textbook. I’ll be honest, I really didn’t enjoy teaching from the text, mostly because it wasn’t well written, nor did it offer any exciting practice tools for students.
Furthermore, my classes were missing the spark that I felt with my k-12 students, probably because we didn’t have the time to play with the language in the way I was accustomed. Students had to cover an enormous amount of information in an extremely short semester period.
After community college, I moved to a local university for a semester. This is where the term “Comprehensible Input” was first introduced to me. Though the textbook (yes, another textbook!) was designed with this methodology in mind, I felt like a fish out of water even after I had read and reread all of the accompanying resources that explained how to present the material using CI. What I really needed was to observe other teachers putting this methodology into action.
When the semester ended, so did my appointment, so I returned to the high school setting, and what do you know? The county had ditched their textbook and was rolling out a brand new curriculum centered in CI.
Resources were scarce and my first year was more about surviving than anything else, as I was also teaching AP Spanish for the first time, as well as Spanish 4 Honors.
During my second year, which was this past year, I dedicated myself to learning as much as possible about CI by following teacher blogs and Facebook pages, by attending workshops and, of course, by reading books on the topic. So much of CI does revolve around how I taught my elementary students but it’s more efficient, organized, systematic and measurable, and it’s wonderful to see students carrying on conversations in Spanish using a variety of vocabulary and verb tenses even in their first year.
The Takeaway
After immersing myself in the research behind this methodology and seeing it in action, I have become a true believer that CI does in fact work. Students truly acquire language and they feel good about themselves when they realize what they have accomplished.
In my opinion, I believe that this boost in confidence may encourage students to continue beyond their two year world language requirement, allowing them to become lifelong language learners and more open minded and empathetic individuals.
As the summer unfolds, I’ll continue to research and plan for the upcoming school year. I have already experimented with Movie Talk, Picture Talk and Brain Breaks, all of which I was already using in my classes before I had researched them more in depth and learned how to be more deliberate and effective.
For next year FVR (Free Voluntary Reading) is a must, thanks to a fantastic workshop I attended with Bryce Hedstrom. I was reminded of my own childhood experience in seventh grade with FVR and how I looked forward to those first fifteen minutes of language arts class every day.
My classroom library is already coming together. In fact, during the time I taught elementary school, I collected dozens of great Spanish language children’s books, which have been collecting dust in my home library, so I’m sure students will love reading those.
Moreover, I’ve added some authentic Spanish novels that were required reading in my undergraduate and graduate Spanish courses. Those will be a fantastic option for my upper level students who may seek more challenging material.
To conclude I will admit that the last two and a half decades of my teaching career have been an incredible journey of discovery. I’m not sure if there exists one correct way to teach world languages, but I am convinced that some ways are better than others.
For me, CI is the game changer, as it really encompasses everything that I believe will empower my students by not only giving them a skill that they can use after they graduate high school, but also by raising their level of self confidence as they experience continued success while acquiring Spanish.
An Invitation To Connect
If you’re relatively new to CI, I’d love for you to share the good, the bad and the ugly! What’s working well for you and what have you tried that has been an epic failure with your students? Are you using CI because it’s mandated in your school district or because you just wanted to be the rebel who walked away from the norm to experiment with something new?
If you’re a veteran of CI, why not share some of your best tips with us? Help us to make better use of the time we have with students.
Leave your comments below…and stay tuned because I will update this article as the new school year gets rolling.
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