How To Stay Comprehensible in 2020?

Let’s keep the important thing, the important thing! We need to be comprehensible. No matter what our teaching situation is in 2020, let’s stay comprehensible!

So we’re in 2020 and it seems that no matter how many years of experience we have, we all feel like first year teachers. It is super overwhelming to try to figure out how to post, publish, upload, assess, grade, engage, provide feedback, respond to tons of emails and messages when teaching online, hybrid and even F2F. But we need to keep the important thing, the important thing. We need to stay comprehensible. Why? Because comprehensible input is the essential ingredient for language acquisition.

 ‘comprehensible input’ is the crucial and necessary ingredient for the acquisition of language.

Dr. Stephen Krashen

Let’s be real. We cannot create an entire new curriculum, brand new assessments, and change all our routines to perfectly align our practice to a new, very fluid, and temporary reality. There are things that may not work perfect, and that’s okay. But we need to focus on what we can control and what’s important: Let’s stay comprehensible!

If we stay comprehensible, a lot of great things will follow: ➡ students will acquire language, ➡ students will engage easier, ➡ you and your students will be able to stay in L2 longer, ➡ the affective filter of the students will be lower so they will buy in and connect with you better, and ➡ your students and you will feel more successful because they will see progress in terms of language acquisition.

How?

• Teach to the eyes
• Focus on few, but frequent, vocabulary words or structures
• Go slow
• Use visuals, illustrate or draw
• Do a lot of Personalized Questions & Answers to make the language relevant, student center, and to connect with your students.

WHAT TO DO AFTERWARDS?

After I provide my input, my students and I co-create texts using the super powerful strategy Write and Discuss. I learned this strategy from Mike Peto, and it has been a game changer for my classes. I created these texts with my students during the first weeks of school in my Spanish 1 class. I’m using only few frequent structures with tons of repetition. The language is also student center because either my students are the main character or they are creating the character. It’s fun and fully comprehensible!

If you want to know more about how I structure my lessons, you can access my framework in your inbox. Just complete the info below. This framework has helped me to guide my sequence since I don’t use a textbook.

With the many extra tasks that we have now, focus and being intentional will help us stay positive and healthy. Let’s focus on being comprehensible and we can do this. For more ideas on how to stay comprehensible in hybrid or remote teaching, check out this post.

Let me know what’s working for you! Stay connected. If you’re not a member of my FB Community Growing With CI, join us today. We have tons of free PD sessions about a lot of the things I mentioned in this post and I regularly show up there to share best practices and strategies. We’re in this together.