Welcome to the Beginning Storyteller.

Introduction

Thank you so much for joining me in The Beginning Storyteller Course from CI Immersion.

My name is Andrew Snider, and I have an audacious goal. I want to help millions of people learn to speak a new language. After more than a decade of using Comprehensible Input (CI) and storytelling in my own Spanish language classroom, I am convinced that one of the most important ways to accomplish my outrageous goal is by helping instructors like you become expert storytellers.

Over the years, I've taught dozens of classes with CI storytelling, written several novels and hundreds of easy-to-understand stories for language learners, and spent countless hours developing and refining my curricula based on best practices in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). I learned a lot over that time, and The Beginning Storyteller is my best attempt at sharing that knowledge with you.

The Beginning Storyteller Course is designed to guide you through the process of CI storytelling from beginning to end. Throughout these lessons, I will lead you step-by-step through the various systems that I use in my own storytelling classroom. This course will help anyone become a more effective storyteller but was designed so that even someone entirely new to CI storytelling will be successful. Not that long ago, I was a Beginning Storyteller myself. I can tell you honestly that the storytelling journey is a long one filled with trials that will test you along the way. But with the knowledge you will take away from this course, you can be confident in taking your first steps.

Storytelling is Different

Most language classrooms focus heavily on verb conjugation and explicit grammar instruction, especially at the university level. I admit that I used to be one of those grammar-centric college professors. Despite having learned Spanish through Total Physical Response (TPR) and comprehensible stories myself, I relied heavily on the textbook when I was new to teaching. This meant a heavy focus on explicit grammar instruction, but deep down I knew was the wrong approach to help most learners build proficiency.

While in graduate school in 2010, I took a course in language pedagogy. It was in this class that I was introduced to two very influential figures in the SLA world: Dr. Stephen Krashen and Dr. Bill VanPatten. Their ideas about CI and internal language processing are the keys to understanding how it is that we acquire languages. Yet most language classes are designed around conscious learning. This is the antithesis of how languages are acquired. I can raise my hand as being one such language instructor in the past. My classes were all about verb conjugation and memorizing grammar rules. The results were not good. I’m talking “I took four years of Spanish in high school, but I can’t speak it”, kind of results. I knew there had to be a better way – the Krashen and VanPatten way.

Building a curriculum around Krashen’s and VanPatten’s essential ideas led me down a path that changed my life forever. It is because of CI storytelling that I began writing stories and developing my own set of comprehension-based curricula. Designing my courses around stories and CI tasks helped me develop systems that make language teaching seem effortless for the instructor and language learning a joy for students.

These systems have reshaped my entire teaching process and today my classroom is different. I ditched the confusing grammar explanations and went back to basics. Now I teach Spanish almost exclusively through CI storytelling and comprehension-based tasks. It just makes sense to me because we are creatures of story.

Humans have been telling and listening to stories for thousands of years, which far predates the written word. While each story takes a different form and will seem unique externally, under the surface there are common storylines and archetypes that appear in almost every story, even across cultures from all around the world. Indeed, there seems to be something universal about stories and storytelling. They are embedded deep in the human psyche. The Beginning Storyteller looks to take advantage of these deeply embedded characteristics.

Since we know that the driving force behind acquisition is mentally processing CI (and lots of it), we can tap into this deep force to teach language in a natural way. Not just any story will do, however. A great story told in an incomprehensible way will have little impact on acquisition. By making stories comprehensible to learners, we put the language with within reach. A story provides a natural context for input that the learners can easily process and digest. And the more CI they get, the more their mental model of language approximates that of a native speaker over time.

Learning to speak a new language is a Herculean task, but CI storytelling makes it feel easy. Engaging stories take our focus off the "how" we communicate and put it squarely on the "what" and the "why". In other words, when we hear and read stories, our brains only care about the message of the text. When you read the Lord of the Rings, for example, you didn't care that Frodo used the first person singular form in the present indicative. You cared about his perilous and heroic quest to destroy the ring. When you watched Stranger Things, you were unconcerned with the use of the past participle. You were concerned about a group of seemingly helpless kids trying to save one of their best friends with the help of a little girl with superpowers.

Since the mental processing of CI is the driving force behind acquisition, you want to give students as many chances as possible to do just that. Storytelling gives the learner's a multitude of opportunities to process the language. When done properly, storytelling is so engaging for learners that it keeps them coming back to the CI well again and again and again.

It's Not Easy

The idea of CI storytelling is elegant, but it's not necessarily easy to implement in the classroom. Designing a storytelling course is a complex set of tasks. There are numerous of skills to learn and a lot of moving pieces. But I can assure you that it is well worth the effort. Nothing worth doing is ever easy. I am convinced that CI storytelling is the key to unlocking your students' language learning potential. And you, The Beginning Storyteller, hold that key in your hands.

What You Will Learn

Throughout this course we will take a deep dive on the most important elements for The Beginning Storyteller to achieve success with CI storytelling. We will work through an example story together so you can see how the various systems and processes unfold. This is broken down into the following lessons.

LESSON 1: FIRST STEPS

In this lesson you will learn how to develop a CI storytelling syllabus, how to define and limit a scope and sequence for your courses, how to select stories that fit your new scope and sequence, and how to develop systems that make your life run more smoothly.

LESSON 1 OUTLINE:

• Writing a syllabus that reflects CI Storytelling
• Defining and limiting the scope and sequence of your course
• Selecting and/or developing stories that fit with your new scope and sequence
• Developing systems for things like lesson planning, grading, attendance-taking, class norming, generating student buy-in, etc.

LESSON 2: PRE-STORY PHASE

In this lesson, we will explore starting the term to prepare learners for storytelling by using student-created and student-centered curriculum. We will introduce the idea of “orbiting” or “circling”, which is the subtle art of asking tangential questions. Finally, we will examine the benefits of TPR and how to incorporate it into your classroom.

LESSON 2 OUTLINE:

• Starting the Term
• Using learner-generated content
• Intro to “orbiting” / ”circling”
• Intro to Total Physical Response

LESSON 3: TELLING THE STORY

In this lesson we will go through the telling of a story together. We will do a deep dive on “orbiting” or “circling”, which is one of the most important skills for The Beginning Storyteller. We will explore how to get additional repetitions by using student actors, asking personalized questions to the class, generating artwork for the story, checking comprehension, and adding new 'in-bounds' vocabulary as necessary.

LESSON 3 OUTLINE:

• Deep dive on “Orbiting” / “Circling”
• Telling the Story
• Student-generated artwork
• Summarizing the Story
• Student Actors

LESSON 4: WRITING AND READING THE STORY

In this lesson we will look at writing more than one version of the story to provide even more CI. We will discuss systems to implement that will make the writing process much simpler. We will also discover various ways to have learners read through a story to keep things from getting stale.

LESSON 4 OUTLINE:

• Writing the story
• Systems to simplify writing the story
• Various ways for learners to read the story

LESSON 5: GUIDING LEARNERS FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT

In this lesson, we will examine a variety of ways to extend the flow of CI beyond the story through CI tasks that lead from input to output.

LESSON 5 OUTLINE:

• Intro to various kinds of input activities
• Extracting activities from the story
• Moving from Input to Output

LESSON 6: ASSESSMENT

In our final lesson, we will take a deep dive on the different kinds of CI assessments you can use in your storytelling classroom. We will explore making formative and summative assignments that assess proficiency and that are easy to grade via rubrics.

LESSON 6 OUTLINE:

• Traditional grammar assessments and storytelling
• What makes a good assessment
• Explore various kinds of assessments that pair well with storytelling

Gratitude

Before we move on, I want to thank you again for accompanying me in The Beginning Storyteller Course from CI Immersion. I’m excited for your journey, and I hope you are too. Let’s cross the threshold and take your first steps together.

Andrew J. Snider
ciimmersion.com