Let me tell you: it’s BIG. This is a road map for language teachers who are teaching “comprehensible input”. What is comprehensible input? It’s learning language and being exposed to a language without understanding every word and structures in it. It’s considered to be one level above what the learners understand. Teachers are teaching the class in the target language, and students are getting input that’s well…comprehensible. There are various tools and cool activities that are delineated in this book. It’s very comprehensive…not to be confused with comprehensible. (lulz) I liked a lot of what the author Ben Slavic suggests such as
- speaking much, much slower while teaching in general. We teachers don’t realize how quickly we speak because we understand the material really well. This isn’t a thing that just applies to language teachers, this is across the board. He suggests that language teachers have about a 2-3 second pause between EACH WORD. I find that to be very tedious, however if the students are brand new to the language, I guess that makes sense. One of my biggest take aways from this book is that we all need to slow down the speech because I guarantee you, that many students are getting about half of what we’re saying. Which leads me to my next point:
- Slavic also suggests “circling” concepts. Again, it’s not just applicable to language teachers. The more students hear a certain word, or structure, the more input they are receiving and they won’t have to memorize all of the conjugations (I still like conjugations, but I guess I’m weird). Students will simply have the material ingrained in their consciousness and the structures will just sound right. This is what language learning is about. This can be applied to other classes as well. Perhaps the “structures” are being circled hundreds of times, like Slavic suggests, however I believe that reiterating material over and over again until the students are sick of hearing it, is important. When they’re sick of hearing it, that finally means that they got it and then it’s redundant, and it finally stuck. Maybe…that’s my theory anyway.
There is still more reading that and implementing that I am doing with this book…did I mention that it was BIG? So far, these are the big takeaways for me that I have learned to apply in my classes. I speak a lot slower when I am introducing new material and inputting new language and structures. I have been forced to become more self-aware in the classroom and I consciously put on the brakes when I feel that I am speaking way too quickly and students eyes start glazing over. I remind myself to slow down and go over the material a few more times, and not to just gloss over a valuable conversation because I need to “get through” the “material”. The material will always be there, and it’s not a matter of plowing through the course, but rather letting kids receive input that is truly comprehensible, and a lot of that depends on me.
Speaking slower is hard! I'm not a language teacher, but I did have to force myself to speak slower when teaching ethics or philosophy. Students need time to hear the unfamiliar words and then try to make sense of them.
On a separate note, I love the penguin meme. Have you seen the video of the penguins checking out the empty aquarium?
I love the penguins in the aquarium they're so cute! <3
This is actually great advice for us all… i found students in English learned the harder vocab words when I made a point of using them in context repeatedly and incorporating harder sentence structures in everything I said… But I do speak too fast — in any language — but French might be even worse
Interesting! I can see how this would be effective! From someone who took 5 1/2 years of Spanish and has forgotten most of what I learned… I can still understand about every third word when someone speaks to me in the language! And the slower the speech, the easier it is for me to understand! Just don't ask me to respond back! No comprendo.