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Arts Integration to Boost Language Development

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Arts Integration to Boost Language Development

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Comprehensible Input Demo for Language Rich Classrooms Training

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"The meaning of even a single word is rather more complex than one might imagine."

- Editors of the American Heritage Dictionary, 1980, p. viii

"Teacher, do we need our pencils today?" my Puerto Rican elementary students would urgently ask when I came to their classroom to escort them to my English as a Second Language classroom. I was a student teacher in a Massachusetts elementary school, and it took me awhile to figure out the correlation between the pencil and hallway behavior. If I replied, "Yes, you should bring a pencil," the walk to my classroom took 15 minutes and involved a lot of disruptions, student squabbles, drifting students and other various misbehaviors. As a student teacher, I was very focused on keeping order and creating a challenging learning environment. If I replied, "No, you don't need a pencil today," the walk to my classroom took about five minutes, even with a stop at the drinking fountain.

So, what was the correlation? Writing. The students knew that if they had to bring a pencil they would have to do writing in the class, and they dreaded it. If they didn't need a pencil, we would be working on projects or doing more verbal work, and they liked that. What they weren't expecting was that half-way through my student teaching, I bought 10 boxes of pencils and kept them in my classroom, so they never had to bring a pencil to class - I had plenty to go around. This improved the hallway behavior, but still left me with the question of how to improve ESL student writing when they were frustrated by the practice and went to great lengths to avoid it.

I have been teaching ESL for many years and there is no perfect solution to this problem; however, I do believe I have added quite a few writing activities to my bag of tricks and improved my ability to differentiate writing tasks based on student ability. As I improved my ability to ensure that each student would be successful in the writing activity, their confidence increased, and they were less likely to engage in disruptive behavior. You know what I'm talking about - the long, dramatic search for a pencilâ€¦ and then paperâ€¦ or the meandering walk about the room to get yesterday's writing draft, or the ever popular, "15 minute pencil sharpening" session. I hope some of the writing activities I share with you will help you to reduce anxiety in your ESL students and increase their language and writing skills.

There is a very important correlation between writing and language development. As students develop language skills, they often develop listening skills first (lots of input they can understand), then speaking (they begin to formulate their ideas in the second language), then reading (they can understand the sound/symbol correspondence of the new language and make sense of the words) and finally writing (they have enough language to express their own ideas in writing). This is not true for 100% of language learners, but it is true for the majority of them. Why is writing often the last skill to emerge? It almost seems that reading would be more difficult because the student needs to sound out words and understand the author's message. It would seem writing might be easier because students are sharing their own ideas already in their heads and simply putting them on paper. However, writing requires a lot more processing of language in order to produce a message.

First the student must have an idea, then think of the appropriate way to say it, then start to write it and spell it correctly, and then create another sentence to continue to communicate the idea. If we add the students' worry that they are making huge, embarrassing errors or that their ideas aren't very good in the first place, then we begin to understand the complexity involved in writing in a second language. In fact, the way we communicate, or the way students put their ideas on paper, is largely influenced by their culture. In some of my classes, my Asian students were very confused when I told them to revise their writing because this was a "first draft." In their experience they had always written an item once and submitted it as "the final," and then the teacher would correct it. The idea that they had to write it over again didn't make sense to them. Students from other cultures may have developed a storytelling style that involves laying out a lot of background information and detail and takes quite a while to get to the point. In most western writing, we expect a topic sentence or a lead paragraph that will tell us what the point is, and then everything written after that leads to a direct conclusion. Many of my students had great difficulty connecting their ideas this way.

With that said, teachers have a big task in improving ESL student writing skills, but the payoff for instructional dedication can be great. A researcher on adolescent literacy at the University of Minnesota, David O'Brien, did a study on improving the reading skills of adolescent students. All of the students were involved in a six week study and during that time they were responsible for creating brochures and other types of communication on computers. They had criteria to input a certain amount of text and graphics to create a final project. This required lots of thought and revisions to achieve the final result. At the end of the six weeks the students took a reading test and the majority of them had improved their reading skills significantly. This was a very interesting result, considering that the teachers had not focused on teaching reading skills. The conclusion was that students used meta-cognition to process language and work with it in a more meaningful way, so that consequently their reading skills improved even though they were mostly working on writing.

Additional positive academic results have been seen in the "90 90 90 Schools." These are schools that researchers have identified as 90% poverty, 90% students of color and 90% achieving standards. This is a most remarkable combination in the educational world. The researchers examined these schools and found one common denominator among them - they all focused on developing writing skills. Each school had an agreed upon writing curriculum and methodology that was used at all grade levels, and student writing was prominently displayed throughout the building and in classrooms. Students used writing in all content areas to demonstrate academic concepts learned. In the end, 90% of the students in these schools were able to pass state grade-level tests based on the academic standards.

Now that I have hopefully convinced you that all your hard work will pay off, I would like to introduce some effective writing activities. I would like to acknowledge that there are many types of effective writing instruction used in classrooms today, including process writing, graphic organizers as writing planning tools, vocabulary stretchers, etcâ€¦ and all of those are beneficial to ELL students. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on a few writing activities that I think are particularly useful when working with students with a wide-range of English language skills.

How to differentiate writing activities:

With some pre-planning, a teacher can create a writing assignment that will allow every student to be successful. For example, the teacher may give a writing assignment that has A, B and C levels (or they can be number or color-coded).

ELL students at Level A copy a sentence or short passage exactly as it is written. This helps beginning-level students who are not very familiar with the language, but may be able to interpret some of the information as they copy it.

Level B students receive a paragraph or two that has blank spaces in the text. The students write the word or phrase that completes the sentence. This allows the student to write an amount that is not overwhelming and helps them comprehend the information.

Level C students write on their own, but perhaps they receive paragraph prompts or are allowed to look in a book, but must put the idea in their own words. After some practice with this system and getting to know your students' English language skills, you will be able to create a system that works best for your class.

Language Experience Approach

The Language Experience Approach draws on instructional techniques used with younger children who have not yet developed literacy skills. In this approach, the teacher presents information to the students, or they have an "experience" of some sort - for example, a field trip, or acting out a scene in a book. Then the students tell the teacher what to write on the board to explain the experience. This may be useful as an activity for a volunteer or teacher's aide to use with a small group of ESL students during literacy time. Here are the steps.

1. Experience something - for example, the students have listened to the story, "The Little Red Hen" and then acted it out.

2. The teacher stands by the board or a large sheet of paper and says to the students, "Tell me the story of the Little Red Hen."

3. As each student tells a part of the story, the teacher writes it down on the board, just as it was stated. For example, a student might say, "The Little Red Hen work so hard and nobody want help her." This continues until each student has spoken or the story is finished.

4. Then the teacher tells the students, "Let's read the story together and listen to see if the story makes sense and if there is anything we want to change."

5. After reading the story, the teacher asks students if they want to change anything. For example, one student may raise her hand and say, "I think it should say, "worked" not "work." The teacher may ask other students if they agree or disagree.

6. If the suggested change is correct, the teacher offers praise and moves on to the next suggestion. If the suggested change is not correct, the teacher should help the student analyze the suggested change. For example, if the student says, "I think it should say, â€˜The Little Red Hen she worked so hardâ€¦." The teacher would ask if others agree and see if there is discussion, then the teacher could point out that the Little Red Hen is the pronoun or "name," so in English we don't need to put it in twice. We can say "She worked so hard." Or "The Little Red Hen worked so hard."

7. When students have analyzed and corrected the whole text, the teacher may either circle a few more spots where students missed corrections and they can be challenged to figure out what the change should be, or the students can be instructed to copy the text with the corrections included.

8. As a final activity, students are instructed to take the story home and read it to three people and bring it back with signatures.

After this activity, usually even beginning-level ELL students are able to read the story to others because it was their experience, it is in their own words, and they have worked with the text in a meaningful way.

Sentence Auction

This activity helps students analyze common writing errors through a personalized activity since they are trying to buy their own sentences. Once a week or once a month, a teacher can hold a "Sentence Auction." The teacher takes sentence examples from student writing - some of which have errors and some that don't, and writes them on a handout or overhead projector. The identity of the student who wrote each sentence is not revealed. To begin the sentence auction, each student is given an "account" of perhaps $300. The students are told to "bid" on the good sentences. The winner is the student with the highest number of "good" sentences.

1. The teacher takes on the persona of an "Auctioneer" and opens the bidding at $10.

2. The teacher reads out the sentence confidently exactly as it is written. "Him want to go to school very bad." Who will give me $10?"

3. The students take turns bidding until the teacher decides who has "won" the bid.

4. Some sentences will not sell because students will know they are "bad." Just leave those sentences and move to the next one.

5. After all the sentences have been sold, the teacher goes through the list and the students say whether the sentence was good or bad. If they agree that it was a bad sentence, then the teacher asks them to explain how they can make it a "good" sentence.

6. Finally the students can count how many "good" sentences they have (since they may have bought some bad ones) and a winner is declared.

7. The teacher may want to give a little prize or certificate to the student. In a variation of this activity students can work in pairs or groups to buy the sentences.

Error correction

I have never "corrected" my students' writing mistakes, at least not in the traditional way. I have always told my students, "If I correct your English, I improve my English; if you correct your English, you improve yours." I handled corrections in one of two ways: either I identified what errors I would be looking for in the writing submission or I told them I would only circle five errors in the whole paper. If I pre-set the errors I would look for, for example correct use of past tense, I would only correct past tense errors, even if I saw other glaring errors in the paper. Sometimes this was hard to do, but I wanted to maintain the students' focus on the writing improvement we were working on. If I set a number of errors I would circle, for example, five, then I carefully chose those five and ignored the rest. When I returned the papers, the students were responsible for correcting their own mistakes. If they weren't sure how to do it, they could check with a classmate, and if no one knew, then I would assist. Invariably the students would ask, "Are these the only errors in the paper?" and I would tell them no. They might be disappointed, but they came to understand the value of correcting their own errors when they submitted a piece of writing.

Quick Write

One of the challenges for ELL students when they approach writing is their anxiety about writing their ideas correctly and writing a lot of information in English. This may feel overwhelming when a student is assigned an essay. In order to get students comfortable with the idea of just putting ideas on paper and not worrying about mistakes, we do regular "quick writes." For "quick writes" I give the students a topic and then tell them to write as much as they can for five minutes. They need to keep their pencils on the paper and even if they can't think of anything to write or they are worried about how to spell things, they are supposed to keep writing. At the end of five minutes, the students count how many words they were able to write and they keep track in a log. The objective is that they will see progress in the amount of writing they are able to do in five minutes' time and hopefully apply this fluency to their essay writing.

Cinquain poems

Cinquain poems offer great flexibility in working with ELL students of a variety of language levels. The basic Cinquain formula is as follows, but teachers can modify it as needed according to the student language level.

One noun
Two adjectives
Three gerunds (words + ing)
A short sentence.
A one-word summary
An example of a Cinquain a student might write:
Home
Warm, happy
Loving, welcoming, helping
People you love.
Family

There really is no wrong way to do a Cinquain, students can put key vocabulary words together any way they like to create the message they desire. Teachers may want to use Cinquains to reinforce new content vocabulary and concepts as well.

With these writing activities to try in your classroom, the only thing left is to buy a few boxes of pencils, hand them out to your ELL students and help them discover the possibility of joy in writing. Teachers who use a variety of activities and strategies to help ELL students become comfortable with expressing their ideas in a new language and finding success with small writing tasks, will give their students' confidence for a lifetime of self-expression. I offer this Cinquain poem to sum it up.

Writing
Fun, creative
Thinking, sharing, revising
Lots of ideas.
Proud
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Improving Writing Skills: ELLs and the Joy of Writing

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"The meaning of even a single word is rather more complex than one might imagine." - Editors of the American Heritage Dictionary, 1980, p. viii "Teacher, do we need our pencils today?" my Puerto Rican elementary students would urgently ask when I came to their classroom to escort them to my English as a Second Language classroom.

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The acronyms BICS and CALP refer to the length of time required by immigrant children to develop conversational skills in the target language and grade appropriate academic proficiency in that language. Understanding the difference between social language and academic language acquisition is an important concept for teachers working with non-native students. Learn more in our academic language resource section.
BICS = social language
Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) refer to linguistic skills needed in everyday, social face-to-face interactions. For instance, the language used in the playground, on the phone, or to interact socially with other people is part of BICS. The language used in these social interactions is context embedded. That is, it is meaningful, cognitively undemanding, and non-specialized. It takes the learner from six months to two years to develop BICS.
CALP = academic language
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) focuses on proficiency in academic language or language used in the classroom in the various content areas. Academic language is characterized by being abstract, context reduced, and specialized. In addition to acquiring the language, learners need to develop skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring when developing academic competence. It takes learners at least five years to develop CALP. Research from Collier and Thomas (1995) has shown that it may take children with no prior instruction or no support in native language development at least seven years to develop CALP.

The distinction between BICS and CALP was made by Professor Jim Cummins.

Learn more in Explaining BICS and CALP from EverythingESL.

Video: BICS and CALP

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The acronyms BICS and CALP refer to the length of time required by immigrant children to develop conversational skills in the target language and grade appropriate academic proficiency in that language. Understanding the difference between social language and academic language acquisition is an important concept for teachers working with non-native students.

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If it takes a village to raise a child, then the village elders had better work well together, especially when it comes to raising children with different home languages. Thankfully, more and more districts are encouraging content and English language teachers (ELTs) to join forces to support their multilingual students. There are certain things ELTs can do to cultivate these dynamic relationships, and also things we should avoid doing.

I've collaborated with content teachers as a language specialist for over eight years, and I'm still learning how to improve. The don'ts on the list below are my battle scars-lessons I've learned from being too pushy and judgmental while co-planning. I encourage educators to strive for the dos when collaborating with other teachers-as I still have to remind myself to do.

Developing Language

Do identify the ways words are used in each discipline. For example, a factor in math is not the same as a factor in social studies. An ELT can help students understand the concept of a factor in social studies by offering this sentence stem: "One factor that led to World War I was...." When co-planning with a math teacher, an ELT can suggest using different color manipulatives to help show the concept of factoring.

Don't expect content teachers to also be teachers of English-especially English as a second language. Help content teachers learn how experts in their discipline (e.g., scientists, historians, economists, designers, painters, musicians, physical trainers) use English to communicate their content knowledge or process English texts.

Building Relationships

Do reuse effective strategies that match a content teacher's style. For example, if a content teacher prefers lecturing and has started incorporating visuals you've gathered, encourage them to continue using even more visuals while lecturing.

Don't use a co-planning session to point out when a lesson bombed. It makes the content teacher feel like they're being judged-and when people feel that way, they distance themselves from the person doing the judging. In a collaborative relationship, emotional distance is a burden that hampers the process of working together toward a common goal.

Differentiating Instruction

Do identify the content that the English language learners (ELLs) need to learn, how the content teacher intends to teach it (the process), and the product that students are supposed to create to demonstrate understanding. After identifying these three things, you and the content teacher can collaborate to scaffold resources, differentiate the learning experience, and offer alternative ways to demonstrate the same learning outcomes.

Don't expect the ELLs to do less than their peers, or suggest that content teachers present different or less rigorous content. Work with the content teacher to make content accessible and engagement with that content possible. Work with them to make instruction explicit and clear for ELLs while not making the learning tasks easier. Keep the mountaintop high-just offer a different path or provide different gear to get students there.

Offering Suggestions and Feedback

Do add suggestions using additive phrases such as, "In addition to..., we might consider...," or "Yes! Let's do that, and for the ELLs, we can also...." Success in co-planning is about adding onto someone's ideas, not subtracting from them.

Don't use judgmental phrases such as, "It would be more effective if...," "A better idea would be...," or "We can improve on this idea if...." Those are highly loaded, evaluative comments that will only divide you and the content teacher.

Reflecting

Do privately reflect after each collaboration session to identify what worked well, what you did that the content teachers liked, and what triggered those teachers. Use each collaboration session to form a clearer profile of your content partners and improve your teaching relationship.

Don't end a collaboration session without praising the content teacher for something they contributed during the planning. Explain how ELLs will benefit from something the teacher agreed to implement. Content teachers need to know that language specialists recognize their efforts in making content and learning more accessible for ELLs.

If we want English learners to succeed in mainstream classrooms, we cannot work alone. More than ever, content teachers and language specialists need to have a positive working relationship in order to plan effective instruction and design meaningful learning experiences. If we have anything less, it is students who will suffer.

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If it takes a village to raise a child, then the village elders had better work well together, especially when it comes to raising children with different home languages. Thankfully, more and more districts are encouraging content and English language teachers (ELTs) to join forces to support their multilingual students.

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Twelve years ago, I was interested in how collaborative teaching might work for our ESL program. I had read about ESL teachers who were "pushing into" the general education classroom to collaborate with classroom teachers and wanted to see for myself. After meeting with administrators and some classroom teachers, I had the advantage of being able to choose the teacher, the grade level, and the subject area for this experiment. I decided to push into Ms. Parson's 3rd grade social studies class, where I had a group of intermediate English learners (ELs).

Ms. Parson was enthusiastic about the collaboration because she had worked with collaborating teachers from the special education program in our school and had found it to be beneficial to her special ed students. I talked to Ms. Parson about doing more than working with my small group of ELs on the fringes of the classroom. I wanted to coteach social studies to the whole class so that I could demonstrate techniques and scaffolds that work well with ELs. I thought at the time (and still do) that good strategies for teaching ELs were good for all students. Ms. Parson agreed to share instruction and planning with me. This became a wonderful collaboration that benefited all of the students in her class.
Ideal ESL and Classroom Teacher Collaborations
Ideally, an ESL/classroom teacher collaboration involves two credentialed professionals who are partners in the instruction of the lesson. They share the responsibility for planning lessons so as to provide differentiated instruction in a manner that is not always possible for one teacher. Lesson planning time is built into their schedules. Collaborative teachers are using the same physical space, and ELs are not pulled out of the classroom for one of the teachers to instruct. Although small heterogeneous groups may be pulled aside for reinforcement, ELs are not isolated from mainstream students.

In elementary schools, ESL teachers generally come into classrooms for one instructional period each day. I spent 2 hours each week coteaching in Ms. P's 4th grade social studies class. Together, we were able to lower the teacher-to-student ratio and combine our talents to provide comprehensive instruction for all of the students in her room.
The Flip Side of Collaborative Teaching
Over the past 10 years, collaborative teaching has become more popular as school districts search for ways to best serve the needs of their ELs. Collaboration with general education teachers is not new to most ESL teachers. We have always collaborated with them to support the ELs in their classrooms. Most elementary ESL teachers have also been teaching content-based ESL for the past 10 years. We are not strangers to the idea of teaching English through content. If you ask ESL teachers who have tried coteaching, you will hear both negative and positive responses.

Compare the coteaching experience of Paulo, a "push in" ESL teacher in a large New Jersey elementary school, to the experience that I had with Ms. Parson. Paulo teams with five different teachers each school day. He also teaches two classes of beginners in a pullout setting. Because of his workload, he is unable to plan lessons with his coteachers. When he goes into some classrooms, the teacher turns the students over to Paulo and uses the time as a prep period. In others, he is helping a few ESL students at the back of the room while the classroom teacher works with the rest of the students. Usually, he serves as a classroom aide, roving around the room to help students who do not understand the instruction. He is not necessarily scheduled into a classroom when the students need him most. This is collaborative teaching at its worse.

Administrators need to realize that ESL professionals are not classroom aides. They should not be relegated to the back of the room with ELs. What is the point of "push-in" ESL if students are kept on the fringes of classroom instruction? Both teachers have a contribution to make. The classroom teacher contributes knowledge of the curriculum while the ESL teacher brings knowledge about teaching strategies for ELs, second language acquisition, and diverse cultures.
Concerns About Coteaching-And How to Address Them

Despite the benefits for ELs when teachers collaborate, ESL teachers that I have talked to over the past few years cite many concerns. They do not want to lose ownership of their students or be relegated to the status of an aide. They feel that collaboration is a lot of additional work-especially if they are coteaching with many different teachers. They are also concerned about ESL beginners, who they feel do not really benefit from learning in the large group setting. One teacher that I spoke to insisted adamantly that coteaching does not work.

It is my impression that in order to feel gratified with their collaborative experiences, ESL teachers need to:

have input into their schedule.

see beginning ELs in a pull-out setting.

coteach specific subjects and be scheduled into the classroom each time the subject is taught.

have time to plan with the coteacher.

enjoy equal status with the coteacher.

receive professional development with the coteacher.

In Conclusion
I think the benefits of collaboration outweigh the drawbacks. It is obvious to me that a combination of pull-out and collaborative instruction may help ease the transition of ESL teachers as they learn to support the content area instruction of their ELs. School districts need to hire more ESL teachers and consider the needs of collaboration when they place ELs in classes. Professional development is key.

When teachers share the responsibility of instruction, lessons are more creative because two people are planning them. The Common Core Standards introduce the idea that every teacher should be a language teacher. ESL teachers need to step up and help general education teachers meet that goal.

What are your experiences with collaborative teaching, and how have you addressed any issues that arose?

About Judie Haynes

Judie Haynes taught elementary ESL for 28 years and is the author and coauthor of eight books for teachers of ELs , the most recent being "Teaching to Strengths: Supporting Students Living with Trauma, Violence and Chronic Stress" with Debbie Zacarian and Lourdes Alvarez-Ortiz. She was a columnist for the TESOL publication "Essential Teacher" and is also cofounder and comoderator of the Twitter Chat for teachers of English learners #ELLCHAT.

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Collaborative Teaching: Addressing ESL Teacher Concerns | TESOL Blog

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Twelve years ago, I was interested in how collaborative teaching might work for our ESL program. I had read about ESL teachers who were "pushing into" the general education classroom to collaborate with classroom teachers and wanted to see for myself.

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SIOP Lesson Plans and Activities

Our collection of SIOP lesson plans and activities includes exemplary SIOP lesson plans developed by teachers who were involved in the foundational SIOP research study, as well as new updates from our current research and professional development projects. We invite you to read these lesson plans and activities individually or with your colleagues in order to learn more about the SIOP Model. You may want to discuss why these lessons are effective for English learners or how to incorporate the SIOP strategies these teachers used in your own lessons.

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Spotlight

CAL was a partner in the Center for Research on the Educational Achievement and Teaching of English Language Learners (CREATE). CREATE researchers developed curriculum to build the language and literacy skills of English learners in the middle grades. Lesson plans and materials were infused with instructional features of the SIOP Model including language objectives, explicit vocabulary instruction, student interaction, building background knowledge, and comprehensible input.
Learn more.

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Our collection of SIOP lesson plans and activities includes exemplary SIOP lesson plans developed by teachers who were involved in the foundational SIOP research study, as well as new updates from our current research and professional development projects. We invite you to read these lesson plans and activities individually or with your colleagues in order to learn more about the SIOP Model.

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The Life Of An Unaccompanied Minor In L.A. | Los Angeles Times

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Reflections on Teaching Multilingual Learners

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Writing language objectives can be hard! Teachers are generally comfortable writing content objectives because those are based on content standards that teachers are familiar with and are sometimes…

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In 1977, linguist Stephen Krashen formed the so-called input hypothesis. This hypothesis puts emphasis on comprehensible input as a key factor when learning a foreign language.

According to Krashen, comprehensible input for ELL students is a part of SIOP, which stands for Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol. This protocol is used to measure a teacher's effectiveness in the classroom by using the following activities:

Lesson plans

Background

Comprehensible input

Strategies

Interaction

Practice

Lesson delivery

Review and assessment

What is comprehensible input?

Input is what the students receive from you as a teacher. Basically, it is what they hear, see, and perceive as you teach. Comprehensible input is a teacher's input that the students can easily understand due to its high quality and relevance. And this is particularly important for ELL students because comprehensive input helps them use information that they already know to understand and interpret new linguistic concepts.

In other words, the teacher's input should be both understandable and a bit challenging for the students.

In this article, we are going to discuss the comprehensible input strategies and activities that will help you create a comprehensible classroom style to efficiently teach your students a new language.

4 Comprehensible Input Strategies

Comprehensible input strategies were developed by Krashen in 1981 and can be described as follows:

1. Direct Instruction

Teachers can use this strategy with beginners, or entering ELLs, who do not understand the language. It consists of instructing the students on what they should do. According to such instructional input, students watch the teacher do something and then they can model it.

2. Joint Construction

This strategy can be used with the students who already have some basic language knowledge, or developing ELLs. Such students can already follow the instructions themselves but still need some guidance from the teacher.

3. Coached Construction

Teachers can use this strategy with intermediate students, or expanding ELLs. Now, the teacher observes the students applying strategies on their own and offers suggestions only as needed.

4. Monitoring

This comprehensible input strategy is suitable for advanced students, or Bridging ELLs. At this stage, they require a minimum guidance from the teacher and are capable of following the instructions without constant supervision.

10 Comprehensible Input Activities

How can you practice the comprehensible input in the classroom? Here are some options:

1. Use different sources of input

Make sure that your students master the language at all levels - speaking, listening, reading and writing. Give your students enough room to experiment with the language.

2. Tell stories

Storytelling is one of the most successful comprehensible input activities, because an exciting story can arouse interest in improving the language skills in order to understand the plot better. However, make sure that your stories include at least 80 percent words and expressions that your students can understand. The stories should also contain realistic examples that may help the students exercise their language skills in real life. Another good idea is to write a story frame and let the students fill in the details.

3. Visualize

One of the comprehensible input examples is to use drawings, images, doodles or objects in order to illustrate the complex or abstract concepts that you are explaining.

4. Sing songs

Songs and rhymes help the students understand and memorize the words that sound similarly or even equally, but have different meanings, for example, "write - right".

5. Play games

There is a wide range of conversational games, such as "I'm going on a trip," "Bingo" or "Important Numbers", which can also be used as comprehensible input techniques.

6. Specialized reading

Read with students the texts that focus only on one narrow topic, and study new vocabulary that is related to this topic. The students can also choose their own topics of interest.

7. Watch news or movies

Dedicate the entire lesson to watching news and movies, and then discussing what you watched in a group. Such an approach will improve both the listening comprehension and speaking skills as part of comprehensible input.

8. Correction of mistakes

Give the students texts that contain grammar or spelling mistakes and encourage them to find and correct those mistakes.

9. Listen and draw

Describe a picture to the students, and then have them draw the picture based on your instructions. Students can also work in pairs and describe the pictures to each other.

10. Adapt your speech

Use less complex vocabulary whenever possible and limit the use of idioms.

We hope that our comprehensive input definition and tips have motivated you to practice this approach in your classroom. Of course, it is up to you to decide what comprehensible input activities will work best for you and your students, but we recommend that you try all of them.
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Top Comprehensible Input Strategies & Activities - VIPKid Blog

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When learning a foreign language, comprehensible input is a key technique. Here are four comprehensible input strategies and top activities you can use.