Start the Year Right: Tools to Help Explain Your Acquisition-Driven Approach

Whether you’ve dipped your toes in or jumped all the way into teaching with a focus on comprehensible input, you’ve surely realized that it is a decisive paradigm shift for students. They are not learning about the language you’re teaching, rather they’re learning about other things using the language. Focusing on the messages themselves as a means to learning that language, instead of the language itself, can be counterintuitive. If we are going to help our students do what they need to do to learn (focus on messages), we need to make sure they know why we are spending so much time chatting about their lives and telling stories. We need to share in the simplest way possible how the brain acquires language. If students don’t believe or understand this, it is very unlikely to work. Sure, a few may be rapt, finding our content so novel and compelling that frankly they don’t care if it is helping them to acquire a new language. However most of our students benefit from knowing why we are doing class this way and how important it is that they focus on understanding messages, even if they may not always be as compelling to them as their cell phones 😂

If prior to your class students learned by traditional methods with a focus on academic achievement vs. comprehensible input and proficiency, it is even more essential that they understand how acquisition differs from learning. Sometimes it doesn’t “feel” like work or progress because you aren’t memorizing lists of vocabulary, grammar rules and getting tested on them. Some of your students who are academic all stars may push back most because they are falling off that throne of superiority they had to other students. Some of them love conjugation tables because they are so good at them! So how can we help ease them into the new year? What should students expect in your class? What do they need to do to be successful?

I made this presentation to help my students better understand what is expected of them in my class and why we learn Spanish the way we do. Feel free to make yourself a copy to use with your students if you’d like! Also on the last slide is a link to a quizizz based on the information presented 🙂

Buy-in on acquisition driven instruction (actually everything you do in your class, let’s face it) is important not only for the students, but for their guardians/families as well. I strongly encourage you to reach out initially to them in some way to get them excited and on your side. Chances are they did not learn a language in school like this. Send a newsletter, talk at Open House, mass mail a letter, however you go about it. A great place to start you off is this FREE letter by AnneMarie Chase on TPT. You can also use this one, also free, created by the Comprehensible Classroom.

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What are your go-tos for starting off the year in your acquisition driven classroom? How do you help your students get on board with acquiring v. learning language?

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