I do not have a catchy name for this. If you have one, tell me.
You can really use this for whatever you want, but I like to use it for comprehension - true/false, questioning about stories, etc.
Sit students in pairs across from one another. Give each student a whiteboard and a dry-erase marker (this isn't strictly necessary if you don't have them, but I find it keeps them honest). Between them, have them put an object that's easy to grab and won't hurt them if they grab it quickly. I, for example, have eleven thousand stuffed animals in my classroom, so these work nicely. I do not recommend things like paper.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
They Don't Notice, plus how we treat grammar
One of the big questions that always comes up for people new to the idea of CI (and, if we're being honest, probably to the people who do it a lot, too) is with regard to sheltering. I have yet to see a textbook (actually, the only book in Latin that I have seen that does this is one that was pointed out by Bob Patrick - it's Tres Ursi, a Latin version of the three bears) that effectively keeps vocab down but goes hog wild with the grammar.
We have this concept that students will not understand what we're saying if we use grammar they don't know. There is only a certain degree to which that's true. But they absolutely won't understand if we use a lot of vocabulary they don't know. People don't have the ability to truly absorb thirty-five vocabulary words in a day or two. They just don't. And when we start throwing around stories and lectures and texts and such that are chock full of words they don't know, we lose them. The textbook I use introduces words like swamp once and then never uses them again, forcing kids either to go hunting in the dictionary or, at the minimum, to interrupt their reading to look at the glossary at the bottom of the page. Swamp is a fabulous word! But it's not repeated enough, it's not relevant to what they're doing, and so all it really serves to do is disrupt them.
We have this concept that students will not understand what we're saying if we use grammar they don't know. There is only a certain degree to which that's true. But they absolutely won't understand if we use a lot of vocabulary they don't know. People don't have the ability to truly absorb thirty-five vocabulary words in a day or two. They just don't. And when we start throwing around stories and lectures and texts and such that are chock full of words they don't know, we lose them. The textbook I use introduces words like swamp once and then never uses them again, forcing kids either to go hunting in the dictionary or, at the minimum, to interrupt their reading to look at the glossary at the bottom of the page. Swamp is a fabulous word! But it's not repeated enough, it's not relevant to what they're doing, and so all it really serves to do is disrupt them.
What Is CI?
It occurs to me that I forgot to gloss this, and that's silly.
CI is Comprehensible Input. It is the theory of presenting understandable, comprehensible, compelling ideas in the target language to our students. This is accomplished a lot of ways - story-telling, play-acting, drawing pictures, sometimes just flat-out glossing words or spot-translating. We can do this by offering communication tools to our students (I don't understand; stop; break that down; tell me that word; slow down) so that they are in control of their learning (plus minusve :D). Evan Gardner points out that to a certain degree, we have to be trained monkeys for them - if they say do that three times and we ever don't do it three times, we discourage them from communicating with us what they need.
CI is Comprehensible Input. It is the theory of presenting understandable, comprehensible, compelling ideas in the target language to our students. This is accomplished a lot of ways - story-telling, play-acting, drawing pictures, sometimes just flat-out glossing words or spot-translating. We can do this by offering communication tools to our students (I don't understand; stop; break that down; tell me that word; slow down) so that they are in control of their learning (plus minusve :D). Evan Gardner points out that to a certain degree, we have to be trained monkeys for them - if they say do that three times and we ever don't do it three times, we discourage them from communicating with us what they need.
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