Controlling the Flow of CI

We instructors control the flow of input in the classroom. Open the faucet too much, and learners will be flooded with incomprehensible language. Open it too little, and they won’t acquire language fast enough to feel rewarded for all their effort.

With CI storytelling, we want to find a sweet spot where learners are exposed to new a limited amount of new language and recycle what they’ve already learned. This is the famous ‘i + 1’, or input at their level plus a little bit of input beyond their current level.

LOSING THE RACE

Teaching a story is not a race to the end. I had heard this warning before my first ever quarter using comprehensible stories in my Spanish class, but I ignored it. The results were disheartening.

It was an intensive summer Spanish class. I had read some books on TPRS, but I didn't have any real life storytelling experience.I had my story scripts in hand, and we chewed through about one story per day. In eight weeks, we did more than 30 stories.

It wasn’t all bad. On the day of each story I would give a comprehension quiz and they scored high marks. My students had understood the stories, and I thought everything was going fine. The problem was that they didn't retain the language nearly as well as I thought they had, which was made obvious on future assessments. Towards the end of the course, one of the learners that was most engaged came up to me and said, "I love this way of learning, but I'm having trouble remembering everything. It's too much!".

Why was this "A" student struggling so much? Was storytelling not all that it was cracked up to be?

When the course was finished, I reflected on how my first CI storytelling course went and how I could improve for next time. I decided to attend a storytelling workshop.

At the workshop I saw demos in French, German, and Japanese. I was amazed at how hard it was to comprehend some sentences and how easy it was to get lost. I had forgotten what it's like to be a language learner. During these demos I quickly identified the mistake I had made in my first storytelling Spanish class:

I went too fast.

I blew through stories as if there were no tomorrow, depriving learners of the opportunity to process the high frequency vocabulary needed to build fluency. They weren't immersed in comprehensible language; they were submerged and drowning. They were held under an ocean of complexity by an instructor with the goal of reaching the end of the story by the end of the class period.

WASH (SLOWLY), RINSE, REPEAT (SLOWLY)

Our students need us to go slow. Even if a learner understands the input the first time around, there's no guarantee they have acquired it to the point that automatic. They probably haven't acquired it yet.

Learners need us to repeat language in new and interesting ways as we tell the story. That means the goal is not to reach the end. The goal is to extend the conversation, provided that the learners are in comprehension mode and are enjoying it.

Over the years I have learned to extend a single story to stretch over multiple days, sometimes for more than a week. It's essential to go slow and repeat yourself to sustain a story for such a long period of time.

So how do you repeat yourself so much without it getting boring? The key is to ask lots of questions in various different ways. We touched on this briefly in the last lesson. Let's look at an example and break it down:

We start with a simple sentence from our story script. Let's assume that the students have named this character 'Bill'. Students (with my nodding approval) have decided that Bill is a 25-year-old man from Buenos Aires.

If you're counting at home, that's six more statements and questions about Bill's age. Now I ask the question again in a different way. This time I ask the same questions about myself.

Changing the subject, verb, or object of the sentence is a way to keep questions fresh. It's also a way to slow yourself down and to keep the repetitions going. We can stay on this one sentence and the related questions for several minutes. Once I a get the sense that most learners are on board and comprehending, we move on to another sentence and start the questioning process from the beginning. At this point, I've probably forgotten where Bill is from, so it's the perfect transition.

The cool thing about rapid-fire questions like these is that they are different enough to seem like entirely new questions. In reality, they are the same questions asked in different ways. Additionally, there is so much information coming the learners' way that they can't help but attend to the message.

It is important to always circle back to the main character, Bill in our example. We always want to return to Bill in order to drive the story forward, albeit slowly. To keep things slow, repetitive and interesting, I can ask questions about Bill, about students in the class, or about myself.

ADDING AN ACTOR

Another technique I often use to slow myself down and get more reps is to assign a student as an actor to play the role of Bill. This allows us to model comprehensible conversation between two speakers.

When you have a student actor it's important to make it clear that the student is just that: an actor. You can make the fictional characters feel bad about themselves, but you never want a learner to feel any more self-conscious than they already are. Learning a new language is hard enough as it is!

You want to build up the student, which you can do by feeding them the lines they should say if they get stuck. The goal of this exchange is not authentic communication, per se. Instead. our aim is to model a conversation and sneak more CI the learners’ direction.

Normally I don't correct a learner's speech when they are brave enough to give an answer in class. I want to encourage them to speak, even if it's not what a native speaker would say. However, I do correct the student actor. I want those exchanges to be more native-like, since their purpose is to model a real conversation.

By adding a student actor, look at the additional repetitions we get on Bill's intelligence. By my count, that's 20 repetitions about Bill's and my intelligence in a comprehensible and communicative context.

REVIEW THE STORY

Another trick going slow is to review what you've done so far. After a you learn a few details about Bill, just review what you've learned. This is a piece of cake, and can easily give you a 30 percent increase in comprehensible repetitions, perhaps more.

There is a man from Argentina. What's his name? His name is Bill. Is Bill 25 or 26 years old? He's 25. How old am I? 24. That's right, I'm 24 and Bill is 25. Is Bill smart? Bill is not smart. That's right, Bill is not smart.

In a short 1-2 minute window, we've reviewed everything we know about Bill. It's a nice summary of what we know and it will keep us oriented while telling the story. Think of this as a spaced repetition built into the storytelling process. It will also slow us down and prevent us from adding too many details too quickly.

There are times when you don't want to repeat yourself so much. If you've done 10 stories about different characters and have talked about their age in each of them, you don't need to go into such a deep questioning mode. You can simply ask how old the character is once and move on to something that your learners do need repetitions on. Your learners' vocabulary will grow throughout the term, which permits more complex stories as this process unfolds.

If I notice that a particular learner seems to not understand a basic question about a character’s age somewhere down the road, I may decide to ask a bunch of questions about age again. Even the advanced learner can benefit from another repetition, and that way we don’t leave anybody behind.

THE SIMPLE TAKEAWAY + WORKSHEET

The key to this module is learning to control the flow of input in your classroom by going slowly and repeating yourself in interesting ways. In this way you can let CI water the seeds of acquisition without drowning your students in an ocean of incomprehensible language.

There's a lot to unpack here, and you'll need time to process this information. I do recommend re-reading this lesson and thinking about how you could control the flow of CI in your own classroom. To review, take some time to complete the worksheet for this lesson.

In the next lesson we will look at extending CI beyond the story with the aim of guiding learners from input to output.