Introduction

Thank you for enrolling in the C.I. Immersion Storytelling Minicourse!

I have the audacious goal of helping millions of people learn to speak a new language. My hope is that by sharing this hard-earned knowledge with you, I can guide you in becoming a more effective CI storyteller, which in turn will help your students achieve proficiency.

The purpose of this course is to share with you three essential skills I learned and refined over a decade teaching with C.I. Storytelling at the university and high school levels. Over that time I’ve told and written hundreds and hundreds of comprehensible stories for learners. I’ve also spent countless hours developing quality C.I. materials for my students.

Each skill is broken down into an easily digestible lesson.

1. Start with a Script

2. Controlling the Flow of CI

3. Beyond the Story: Extending CI

At the end of each lesson is a worksheet to help you review the material and start implementing these skills into your classroom right away.

TEACHING WITH COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT

Teaching a language with Comprehensible Input (CI) is an elegant idea. The instructor provides easy-to-understand input in the target language. At a level deep below consciousness, the learner then processes the input and begins building a more complete mental representation of the language. This subconscious mental model is what learners use to produce written and spoken language. In other words, their output is evidence that they have acquired language. The idea is elegant:

CI + TIME = ACQUISITION

Simple, right? It’s easier said than done. We language teachers often suffer from an Atlas complex. We feel the weight of the world on our shoulders because teaching with CI puts a lot of pressure squarely on the instructor. We are the ones that provide learners with quality, engaging, novel, and most importantly, comprehensible input. How do you sustain this kind of CI for an entire 50 minute class period? Or how about a block of 90 or 120 minutes? It can be overwhelming! That’s where storytelling comes in.

STORYTELLING AS INPUT

There are a million ways to deliver high-quality CI, by my favorite is storytelling. Every other strategy is a distant second. Telling stories recycles high-frequency vocabulary and distracts the learner from consciously trying to figure out grammar. Instead, they must attend to the message of the story to stay engaged.

We are storytelling creatures. A well-told story will captivate us and provide a temporary salve for the troubles of the day. For all these reasons, it is my opinion that storytelling is the perfect vehicle for language acquisition.

Although the vehicle is superb, it can be a daunting task to learn how to operate it. This is especially true when you are just starting out, since there are many things that can go awry.

This is a non-exhaustive list of potential roadblocks:

• The story can get too complex or incorporate too much new vocabulary
• It’s easy to run out of steam and have a story fizzle out.
• Some learners may get lost somewhere in the middle but nod along, faking comprehension. This dramatically reduces the amount of CI they receive and can set the whole class back weeks by the time you finally catch on.
• It’s easy to go too fast and not give learners enough spaced repetition
• It can be difficult to assess. Traditional grammar tests don’t work well for this style of teaching (and they most likely don’t tell us what we need to know to accurately assess proficiency anyway).

WHAT’S NEXT?

In the following lessons we’ll look at three actionable steps you can take right now to instantly level-up your CI storytelling game. We’ll examine how to begin storytelling without feeling overwhelmed, how to sustain the storytelling process over multiple class periods, and how to extend the flow of CI beyond the initial story.

Thank you for joining me in this storytelling minicourse. Learning to teach with stories has been an incredible ride for me, personally. I hope that by sharing this classroom-tested knowledge I can help you grow as you embark on your own storytelling journey.

- Andrew J. Snider