About me

My name is Andrew Snider. I’ve been teaching Spanish with CI and CI storytelling for more than a decade. I’ve taught thousands of learners to speak Spanish and written hundreds of comprehensible stories, penned novels for Spanish-language learners, and am the lead author at Read to Speak Spanish.

Teaching with CI and CI Storytelling are a broad topics, and there’s wealth of related information to digest. I have learned a lot through many hard-fought battles along the way. CI Immersion is my best attempt to share that knowledge with you.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to send me a message - I’d love to hear from you.

How We Learn Languages

We acquire all languages the same way. Acquisition happens when we understand the messages we hear or read in the language. These messages communicate something to us. After a substantial amount of time dedicated to mentally processing these messages, our brains sort out the language through subconscious processes.

The stream of language that we hear or read is called “input”, and our brains are equipped with a special “device” that processes this input. As we receive and process more input in the language, our minds create an increasingly native-like model of the language. This mental representation is what we call on to be able to communicate in the language.

Immersion

Since we pick up languages through hearing and reading input, we must communicate as much as we can in the language to maximize our acquisition. When I teach a Spanish class, my aim is to speak only in Spanish during class. The purpose of this is to immerse learners in Spanish. They are on the path to becoming bilingual or multilingual, but their mental models of L2 are still developing. Sometimes English (or another language) might slip out of their mouths, or they might not be able to say something exactly how they want to say it. This is totally normal. All I can ask is that they try their best to speak only L2, however imperfectly.

Comprehensible Input

Another important factor in language acquisition is whether or not the input we receive is comprehensible to us. Can we actually understand the language we hear and read? If not, the input is not very useful to us. Our internal language processors mostly filter out incomprehensible sounds as “garbled”. Furthermore, incomprehensible language can cause the learner to experience stress, raising the affective filter and preventing acquisition. However, our internal language systems do much better if the input we receive is easy to understand.

Language acquisition only happens in a low-stress environment that is rich in Comprehensible Input (CI). Therefore, my aim is to provide learners with easy-to-understand input while maintaining the an entirely immersive environment in L2.

CI Immersion vs. Submersion

Imagine you want to learn to swim. You’ve heard that the best way to learn is by immersing yourself in the water, and so you sign up for an immersion class. On the first day of class, your instructor takes you out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and asks you to swim back to shore. While it is possible that you dog paddle your way to shore, it is far more likely that you drown.

Many language teachers who use immersion are actually using “submersion”, a sink-or-swim technique that leaves most language learners out at sea. The affective filter gets raised on day one and never lowers, thus preventing acquisition.

As opposed to submersion, CI Immersion is like learning to swim in the shallow end of a pool with an experienced instructor by your side. You are immersed in the language, but the anxiety is minimal because you can touch the bottom if you really need to. In this scenario, the affective filter is lowered, the input is comprehensible, and the learners are primed for acquisition.

Total Physical Response (TPR)

I haven’t ridden a bicycle for three years. I don’t even own a bike. However, I am confident I could get on a bike right now and ride with ease. My body knows what to do because I internalized the process when I was very young. TPR works the same way with acquiring vocabulary. It lets you see and feel the meaning of words. Many students have told me that they remember the vocabulary words we learn with TPR long after the course ends.

I often use gestures in my Spanish classes as a way to aid comprehension and teach essential vocabulary. These words and phrases act as scaffolding for teaching more complex language.

Storytelling as Input

There are many ways to deliver CI, but the main vehicle I use in my classes is a form of storytelling. The learners and I start with a small set of vocabulary and co-create a story entirely in Spanish. Each story goes through a multiday creation process that involves listening, speaking, reading, writing, not to mention lots of internal language processing. Quarter after quarter students tell me that this is the most useful and engaging thing we do for their acquisition of Spanish.