Beyond the Story: Extending CI

We've reached the end of the CI Immersion Storytelling Minicourse. Let's review the three strategies to instantly level up your CI storytelling.

1. START WITH A SCRIPT

A script is a pre-defined road map for telling a story in a language classroom. It provides you a solid foundation while you are honing your storytelling skills. Print it out and hang on to the script while you teach. It's your lifeline. If you get stuck in a hole, go back to the script and pull yourself out.

2. CONTROLLING THE FLOW OF CI

Learners need many, many repetitions of comprehensible and communicative input for acquisition to take place. Telling a story by going slowly and asking repetitive questions in novel ways dramatically increases the CI learners receive in a given lesson.

3. BEYOND THE STORY: EXTENDING CI

It is possible to squeeze more CI out of a story than we may realize. From

a story we can extract entry tasks, survey questions, comprehension questions, and topics of conversation, just to name a few. Extending CI through these story-based activities allows you and your students to dive deeper and be immersed in L2 longer.

GET TO IT!

If you are anything like me, at this point you are probably champing at the bit to get started writing your own storytelling curriculum. That's wonderful! Please don't hesitate to reach out and ask any questions you may have in that regard. I’d love to hear from you.

GRATITUDE

Thank you for your hard work and dedication in this course. I hope you take what you learned and apply it in your own language classroom. While the techniques and strategies in this course are meant to help make your life easier, in reality they help us better serve our students.

I'm reminded of a quote I first saw written on the wall of a church when I was attending a friend's wedding:

Thank you again for taking this course with me. I am truly honored that you took the time to join me. I hope that you can use what you’ve learned to enrich the lives of your students. After all, they are why we do this.

- Andrew J. Snider

LOOKING FOR THE NEXT STEP?

If you found the free C.I. Immersion storytelling minicourse useful, you may also be interested in The Beginning Storyteller,an intensive course where I walk you step-by-step through how I teach my Spanish courses. I’ll show show you exactly how to implement the same systems in your classroom to save you time, increase your storytelling proficiency, and to help you facilitate one-of-a-kind learning experiences for your students.

HELP SPREAD THE WORD

CI Immersion does not advertise, and I don’t actively use social media. The only way we get traffic is via word of mouth. If you liked this free minicourse, please help me spread the word by sharing the following link with colleagues, friends or on social media: https://ciimmersion.com/storytelling-minicourse.

Thank you again!