Comprehensible Input and Personalization

Ben Slavic teaching some of his students French

1. Is it comprehensible?
2. Is it personalized?

According to Ben Slavic's book, "TPRS in a Year", these are the two main questions we should ask ourselves as foreign language teachers if we truly want our students to acquire the language we are teaching them. Acquiring the language, as I understand it, is about much more than memorization. In fact, there are those who would argue that rote memorization isn't actually all that useful in the long-term. We all know those students (and I have certainly been one of them) who simply memorize what they need to know for the next quiz or test and then promptly forget it because they know that we're just going to move onto something new, which they will then memorize, regurgitate for the quiz, then forget. It's an ugly process with rather limited results.

As I see it acquiring the language is about absorbing the language at such a deep level that it becomes a part of your being in the world. You've taken it in to such a point that you don't have to stop to think about it. It has become a reflex. It has simply become a part of who you are.

Acquiring the language, even if only a small part of the language, is ultimately my goal for my students. Because of limited time it is necessary to focus on the most important words and structures in the language. This takes lots and lots of repetition, and patience. Fortunately, we don't actually need an enormous vocabulary to be able to understand a large percentage of what we come into contact with, and with a little creativity we can communicate quite a bit with even a small amount of vocabulary and language structures.

Interestingly enough the 100 most common high frequency words in a language make up about 50% of what we read. Even the top 25 words make up about a third of what we read (Fry,
Kress, and Fountoukidis, 2004). By focusing on the most common vocabulary and really getting that vocabulary down there is an amazing amount that we can understand and do.

So, one major thing that we need to do is to focus on the most used words in the language and make sure our students have them down really really well if we want them to be able to understand what we are trying to communicate so that the language we use is comprehensible to them.

As an aside, I've also been looking into "Immediate Immersion", which is a TPRS based curriculum created by Scott Benedict that was recommended to me by a colleague of mine who has had a lot of success with it so far this year in her Spanish classes. During the first year the teacher primarily focuses on the 100 most common words. During the second year you then focus on the top 200, and so on and so forth. Of course, students come into contact with much more than that, but they aren't expected to have the other vocabulary down like they do with the 100 words that are being focused on that year. To me this seems like a sensible and humane way of teaching a foreign language so that truly all students can be successful- not just the ones that are gifted in that area.