7 Simple Tips for Staying Comprehensible in the World Language Classroom
In a recent blog post, I talked about Comprehensible Input in the World Language Classroom. It was meant to serve as a general overview of what comprehensible input is and is not, and how you can get started using it in your French, Spanish, or Italian classroom. (If you haven’t checked it out yet, or if you’re completely new to comprehensible input and would like an overview, take a quick look and then come back and read this one!).
In this post, I’m going to share SEVEN simple tips and strategies for ensuring that you stay comprehensible while using the target language. I say this often, but it is always worth repeating: language that is not mostly comprehensible to your students is nothing more than mere noise.
These tips will help ensure that your students understand a majority of what you’re saying, which will in turn increase proficiency, motivation, and engagement.
Tip #1: Pre-select vocabulary and grammar structures
When planning a comprehensible input-oriented lesson or activity, I want you to consider the essential vocabulary and grammar that you will target during the lesson. Ideally, you want to select high-frequency words whenever possible, and avoid esoteric or technical vocabulary that students are not likely to encounter often. Language tends to become incomprehensible when we lack structure AND/OR embed too much content in the messages we’re trying to communicate to our students.
If you are new to CI, you may want to consider creating a script that you reference during your lesson so that you have a general roadmap for where you want to take your learners linguistically. As you become a more advanced CI practitioner, you can ditch the script in favor of an index card with a bulleted list of the target vocab and structures, and at some point you’ll get so good that you’ll intuitively know what the target vocab and grammar will be!
Tip #2: Try speaking slowly, and then speak even MORE slowly
It is so important to regulate our speaking rate when we are using the target language. If we speak too quickly, we will lose our students, because we are not giving their brains time to process the input we are delivering. Additionally, speaking too quickly increases the affective filter in our classroom, which essentially means that our students feel more stressed and anxious and put up a sort of “cognitive wall” that prevents them from absorbing the rich input we are delivering.
I promise you that there is no such thing as speaking too slowly in the target language, especially in French, Spanish, Italian, or German 1 and 2.
Tip #3: Repetition is key
Full disclosure: I teach with vocabulary lists, because they are part of my curriculum—and so I sort of have to—but I also think they can be very useful tools in helping students to cognitively organize and compartmentalize information. I know that students need to see target vocabulary MANY times before they master it. We use target vocab in practice activities, flashcards, games, tech-based activities, reading activities… there’s constant repetition inherently built into vocabulary instruction.
Using comprehensible input is the same: we need to repeat ourselves constantly to ensure students have fully and deeply understood the language we have communicated to them. Here are a few ways you can embed repetition into your CI activity:
Rephrase. Restate the main idea a bit differently. (e.g. The big house is on the hill. —> There is a hill, and on the hill, there is a big house.)
Ask Questions. Ask True/False questions. (True or false: The house is small. True or false: The house is on the hill. True or false: The small house is on the hill.)
Simplify. Take the main idea of the sentence or paragraph and restate it in more simplistic terms. (e.g. There is a house. The house is big. The house is on the hill.)
Tip #4: Verify comprehension regularly
When using CI, it’s so critical to remember that it is NOT a one-way lecture! It is a multi-directional conversation. If you are speaking for 5 minutes straight, you’re losing your students. You need to involve them in the conversation, story, or whatever it is you’re working on during that particular lesson.
A simple way to involve your students is to ask comprehension questions every so often. If I am doing a story that I have laid out on 7 or 8 slides, I make sure to ask at least 1 or 2 questions per slide. If you are a beginner, I recommend pre-writing your comprehension questions so you know exactly what you want to ask.
Verifying comprehension regularly ensures that students are following along with you and alerts you to areas of misunderstanding that you might need to clarify.
If you’re interested in short, comprehensible texts that relate to thematic units that you are probably already doing in your French 1, Spanish 1, and Italian 1 classes, check out my Reading Comprehension for Beginners resources below. Each resource comes with four comprehensible texts that are relevant and relatable to students’ lives. Each text comes with differentiated question types: true/false, multiple choice, and short answers, so you can easily differentiate by choosing whichever question format works best for your students. Oh, and did I mention that all questions come in English AND in the target language?!
Check out these resources by clicking on the thumbnails below:
Tip #5: Make it personal
Imagine this CI teaching scenario: You’re telling a story about a boy who has a dog. The beginning of the story might go something like this:
There is a boy named Fred. One day, Fred is walking his dog. Suddenly, he sees and hears something strange in the bushes. His dog starts barking. He feels worried, but he is also very curious. He decides to investigate. He approaches the bush.
Stop there! In one simple paragraph, you’ve set the stage and given your students enough material to work with. Stop with the storytelling. Build some suspense. Involve your students in the conversation by using Personalized Questions & Answers (PQAs) to learn more about your students and to get them engaging with and in the target language.
Let’s be honest… It’s pretty weird to just randomly ask students what their favorite sports are, or if they have any pets, or what their favorite color is…but if you connect these types of personalized questions with the content you are presenting in a CI lesson, the questions feel much more organic.
After just one short paragraph of text, here are a few questions you could ask your class:
Does anyone have any pets? Raise your hand if you have a pet. What kind of pet(s) do you have? A dog? A cat? A fish?
Who has a dog? What is your dog’s name? How old is your dog? Is he friendly? What color is he?
Do you like going for walks? Do you ever walk your dog? Do any of your friends have to walk their dog? How often?
Are you a curious person? Would you investigate if you heard a strange noise coming from the bushes?
Should Fred investigate the rustling in the bushes? Raise your hand if you think he should investigate. Why? Raise your hand if YOU would investigate if you were in Fred’s position.
Notice how these questions take the content of the story that I am telling and flip it around to come back to students’ personal lives. Essentially, you’re using the content of the story to create a classroom context in which these types of questions feel natural and appropriate.
The benefits of this strategy are numerous: you’re re-targeting specific vocabulary from the story, you’re recycling older vocabulary and grammar structures from previous lessons, you’re using repetition, you’re targeting listening comprehension, you’re helping students build speaking fluency, you’re fostering community in your classroom of learners, you’re making the content compelling and engaging… and I could go on!
Tip #6: Shelter vocabulary, not grammar
Try to simplify vocabulary whenever possible. Students do not need to know 10 different synonyms for the word intelligent. Give them one or two ways to say it—preferably a cognate, if possible!—and leave it be. The more vocabulary you give students, the more you overwhelm them. Teach what you deem is most commonly used and/or most important—they will encounter synonyms naturally as they progress on their language learning journey.
With grammar, don’t feel like you have to stick to a prescribed tense or mood, or that you need to avoid certain grammatical structures because they are “too complicated” for the level you are teaching. Think of grammar like a tool that you use to complete a household DIY project: you’re showing students the hammer, the nails, the screwdriver…and maybe you’re even showing them how they could use these tools in a pop-up grammar mini-lesson, but they’re just that: tools that are used to complete the project. No need to fear them!
When babies learn language naturally, they don’t learn present tense, and then past tense, and then future tense in a prescribed order…they learn all of the tenses simultaneously, and they use context to help with the meaning-making process.
We want to do something similar when we’re using CI in our classrooms. Your students will not start to malfunction if you say "Yesterday, I was…” Just show them that "I was” is the past tense of "I am.” Your students will not riot if you say “Tomorrow, I am going to…” or “Tomorrow, I will be…” Just explain what it means!
I show my students past tense and future tense constructions all the time—especially for major verbs like to be, to have, to like, to do/make, to go, etc.—but only so that they’re able to use these tools to help them understand whatever it is that we’re working on.
Tip #7: Illustrate, Gesticulate, Translate!
Well, these are really three tips wrapped up into one. To facilitate comprehension, I recommend getting really good at using the following three techniques: illustrations, gestures, and translations.
* Illustrate! It’s so important to use images to help students make connections to the language they are experiencing. You can either draw on the board, or if you’re (like me) artistically disinclined, then you may want to consider adding images to your slides. (See below)
* Gesticulate! You can’t use gestures for everything, but often it really does help! If you’re describing a house as being large—to take the example from before—you can definitely use your hands and arms to express that the house is large rather than small. No need to illustrate or translate the word if you can simply use a gesture to convey meaning.
If applicable, feel free to use props to help students understand more clearly!
* Translate! Don’t be afraid of using target language --> English translations. Be judicious about when and how often you translate, sure, but L1 is a natural resource. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of it? I like to include translations on my slides of key words that I want my students to focus on, or words that I believe my students will have trouble understanding without the translation. (See below)
Pro Tip: Do not translate too often because students will come to expect the translations and tune out to the TL input you are delivering.
Comprehensible Input is a critical element of language acquisition. As World Language teachers, we should all be infusing CI into our lessons in compelling, engaging, and motivating ways.
I will be writing more in the future about how you can successfully use CI in your French, Spanish, or Italian classroom, but for now, I hope this blog post has been helpful in giving you ideas for how you can make your language more comprehensible in the classroom. Remember, language that is not comprehensible—and therefore comprehended—is just noise! So these techniques really are high-impact and will help move the needle forward in your CI teaching journey.
Do you use CI in your classes? What are some techniques that you use to help your learners understand you? I’d love it if you could share your experience using CI in the comments below!
Happy (comprehensible) language teaching,
~ Michael
