Start of the School Year
This year, as my classes begin, I am already amazed at the power of Compelling Instruction. Only two days into my Spanish I classes and already students are understanding a good chunk of 30+ minutes of only Spanish. By making language comprehensible (writing translations on the board) and compelling (by making it about the students) they are interested in what we’re doing and they are acquiring language.
I have been using Comprehensible Input as a basis for instruction for several years. But it has taken me several years and many different incarnations of lessons, methods, and styles to stumble upon the Compelling Questions that have made all the difference in my teaching.
Dr. Stephen Krashen has said that for language acquisition to happen the language needs to be comprehensible and compelling. What is more compelling in the mind of a teenager than talking about himself or herself? In anyone’s mind really? So spending the first two weeks of class doing nothing but discussing what the students like to do, what they did over the summer, where they go, what they think, and so on, I am able to focus narrowly on the most compelling subjects there are–the kids themselves!
As an added bonus, this compelling instruction also makes kids feel important. Kids believe they really matter in class. When we spend fifteen or twenty minutes discussing how Nora rides horses or how Steven likes to skate, that shows the students that their lives, their hobbies, are important in class. These students really do matter. This strengthening of student-adult relationships in the classroom is something that I consider the greatest blessing of teaching World Languages. While it may seem out of context to get into long personal discussions about what they did last weekend in a math class, in my classroom it fits perfectly into the curriculum. I think we are truly lucky that we can get to know our students on such a deep level. Which makes this instruction compelling for me too.