Input Workshop (Upgrading Your Input)

Update: Video HERE



(TESOL Worksheets--Comprehensible Input, Workshops)
[This is a workshop I gave on using input in the classroom.  
I actually gave this workshop over a year ago now, but didn't publish it at the time because I was thinking that I would finish writing the script before publishing it.  
However, at this point (over a year later) I have to admit to myself I'm never going to finish it, and am just going to publish it as is.
Actually, it's pretty much finished.  The outline, the PowerPoint, and the handout are all done.
The only thing I never did finish up was the script.  That didn't matter for the actual workshop, because I knew what I was going to say anyway, and besides I ended up going off script and just turning the workshop into a discussion anyway.  
I was, however,  intending to finish the script before publishing it on this blog, but at this point it is looking unlikely that I will ever find the time to get around to it.  (Everything I was going to write in the script can be found in the outline, the handout, and PowerPoint anyway).
This workshop is a revised version of workshop I gave back in 2015 on Comprehensible Input for Young Learners.  I revised it mainly because I'm now at a different school, so some of the things I said in the original workshop where no longer applicable to my new situation.  But I also had learned many things since then, and wanted to include some new information and new activities.]
Google drive Folder HERE
PowerPoint: slides, pub
Ideas for using input (handout): docs, pub
Script: docs, pub
Outline: docs, pub

Today’s workshop is about input.  

The formal definition of input is “language which a learner hears or receives and from which he or she can learn”  (Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics).  The word “input” is often used in language teaching to talk about students implicitly or subconsciously acquiring language features just by being exposed to the target language.  It’s often used in contrast to more conscious ways of studying language, like consciously studying grammar or consciously memorizing vocabulary.

We’ll see how the time works out today, but time permitting I hope to be able to talk about a number of ways you can give your students input, including movies, songs, books, stories, plays, jokes, poetry, and I’ll even be encouraging you to do something you’ve been taught to avoid--increasing your teacher talking time.

You can integrate this into your main lesson aims if you’re really clever, but I also think these activities work fine as a supplement to your lesson.  So, for example, in my lessons, I try to carve out 20-30 minutes that are not related to my main lesson aims just to focus on some sort of input, some movie or book or song or whatever.  

But first of all, why bother with input?  Why not just stick to the textbook, and use the PPP method to teach grammar and vocabulary?

Talk about this with a partner, if you could.  What are limitations of using only the textbook, and only studying grammar consciously by presenting the rules, practicing it, and then expecting the students to produce it?

(SET UP ATTENDEES IN PAIRS.  LET THEM DISCUSS.  THEN FEEDBACK AS A CLASS).

Okay, here’s some of the things I’ve thought of.  First of all, the PPP approach relies on consciously teaching language rules to students, and then expecting students to consciously apply these rules in the practice and free production.

The problem with this approach is that conscious attention is limited.  We can only direct our conscious attention towards one thing at a time, and language contains too many features to all be controlled by conscious attention in real-time production.

I mean, think about all the things your brain has to keep track of every time you speak English.  I mean think of all the things your brain has to keep track of for just elementary level grammar.

• The 3rd person “s” attaches itself when the verb is in the present tense, when it has a singular subject, and when that subject refers to something that is neither the speaker of the listener.
• The 3rd person singular “s” is pronounced as /s/ after unvoiced consonants, and /z/ after voiced consonants.  (To voice a consonant, you vibrate your vocal folds).
• In negative sentences and questions, the 3rd person singular “s” moves to the auxiliary verb, and is no longer pronounced on the main verb, but must be pronounced on the auxiliary.  In questions the auxiliary verb moves to the front of the sentence

And then there’s the intermediate level grammar, which gets even more tricky

• The relative pronoun can be omitted if the The relative clause is defining, and the pronoun is functioning as the object of the relative clause.

I think this one is actually in some of our textbooks, for teens, right?

And then there’s pronunciation:

• “the” is pronounced with a long vowel before a consonant, but a short vowel before a vowel sound, unless we want to emphasize something, and then it’s always a long vowel
• the /d/ sound can be omitted when it is between two consonants
• Nasal sounds like /n/ and /m/ and formed by lowering the soft velum at the back of your mouth and allowing air to escape through the nasal cavity

And you get the idea, right?  All that stuff about pronunciation, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, voiced and unvoiced allophones,collocation, register, style, word order, inversion, etc, etc, etc.

There’s no way we can build all of these up as separate blocks and expect the human mind to juggle all of this during free production.  If the learner is going to get to even a basic level of fluency, much of this has to be absorbed subconsciously.

The good news is that a lot of it can be absorbed subconsciously.  That’s how we all learned our first language, of course, and there’s evidence that a lot of our second language can be learned this way.

I have a quote here from Lightbown and Spada.  (By the way, this book, How Languages are Learned is on the shelves at the teacher’s resource center).

 “…research has shown that learners learn a great deal that no one ever teaches them.  They are able to use their own internal learning mechanisms to discover many of the complex rules and relationships which underlie the language they wish to learn.  Students, in this sense, may be said to learn much more than they are taught.” (Lightbown and Spada p. 116).

So, that’s my first point.  Language has too many features to be studied consciously, but through input learners can acquire a lot of the features of language subconsciously.

This is true for all levels and all ages.  Adults need a lot of exposure to input as well.  But it’s particular true for young learners.  Young learners have less of an ability to consciously learn grammar rules and consciously apply them.  

As Krashen puts it:

 “…younger acquirers will tend to have less ability and/or inclination to learn conscious rules.  The amount of homework devoted to conscious learning might therefore vary according to age with adults receiving the most, teenagers somewhat less, and children perhaps none at all. …  Thus a common mistake made in many language courses for children is giving students learning tasks similar to the grammar exercises used by adults.”(Krashen, Terrelll p. 178-179)

 

On the other hand, the strengths of Young Learners are:

Given sufficient exposure to the language, they are better than adults at mimicking the sounds and pronunciation.  They often have better listening comprehension than adults do.  And, given sufficient exposure to the language, they can develop on a subconscious level a more “intuitive grasp of the language” even if they don’t consciously understand the grammar rules.  That is, if you expose younger learners to enough language, they are better at just subconsciously absorbing it than adults would be (Distance Delta, Unit 2, Focus on the Young Learner).

Okay, bear with me here, I’ve got a couple more reasons why we should use input to supplement the textbook.

The “grammar rules” that the textbook presents the students with often don’t reflect how the grammar points are used in real life.  They are often often artificial, incomplete, oversimplifications, or half-truths.

For example, reported speech as it is presented in the textbooks doesn’t actually represent how native speakers report speech.  

The structure of the first, second, and third conditionals are not actually as rigid in real life as the textbooks make out.  

Textbooks will often have a list of rules for in which situation speakers are allowed to use “going to” and which situation speakers can use “will”, but in actuality, “will” and “going to” are a lot more interchangeable in real life than textbooks admit, and these rules are just rough guidelines.  

As for the passive voice, the textbooks will often present this as simply a structural inversion of the active voice, but in real life the passive voice is often functionally much closer to an adjective than to a verb.

Now I’m not saying throw the textbook away completely.  These rules are still useful to give learners a rough guide for usage, especially when they’re first starting out.  But the learners are going to get a very warped view of the language unless these artificial language rules are supplemented by more natural language data.

Reason number 3 applies to aural input only.  But in cases where the sound/spelling correspondence of a word is misleading, then the learners are going to learn the wrong pronunciation of a word if their first exposure is to the written form.  So for example, words like cooked (cookt, not cook ed) island (iland not island) clothes (cloz, not clo thes) aisle (ail not  aisle).

And then once they’ve gotten the wrong form of the word in their brain, it’s very hard to unlearn that.  

Now, for cases where the mispronunciation of the word is due to first language interference, that can’t be helped.  That’s just going to happen.  But in cases where the only reason the learner is mispronouncing the word is because they’ve been mislead by the written form, we can pre-empt that with lots of exposure to aural input.

I know in the CELTA method, we try to pre-empt this a little bit by drilling the word orally before the learners see the written form.  But that’s almost too little too late.   The sound of the word doesn’t get fully established in the learner’s brain, and as soon as they see the written form many of them will automatically switch to the wrong pronunciation.  I’m sure many of you have experienced this in your classes.

It would be better if the learners were being hearing these words in the input for weeks or months or years before they were presented with the written form.

Reason number 4: Learner’s have their own internal syllabus for acquiring grammatical forms.  Textbooks will often violate this internal order, and try to force students to acquire forms before they are ready.

Okay, I’m going to get a little bit technical here, so hang with me.  Has anyone ever heard of the order of acquisition?  (Elicit answer from attendees if possible).  Second language research has shown that there is a certain order in which learners will acquire certain grammar structures.  And they will acquire the grammar structures in this order regardless of the order the textbook tries to force them to learn in.

The theory is again that conscious attention is limited, so in free production the human brain can’t consciously attend to all these grammar structures at once.  The human brain will focus on one grammar structure until that structure becomes so automatic that it no longer requires conscious attention.  And then the human brain will move on to the next grammar structure.

Now, for whatever reason, the human brain tends to prioritize the grammar structures in this order.  

-ing

plural –s

Be copula

↓

Be auxiliary

a/the

↓

Irregular past

↓

Regular past –ed

Third person –s

Possessive – ’s

This is an incomplete list.  You can find more complete lists on line.  But  this gives you a rough idea.  

Now, notice a few things about this list.  First of all, the third person singular “s” is way down at the bottom of this list, even though it is usually taught early on in most textbooks.

Textbooks love to teach the 3rd person “s” because it occurs frequently and the rule is relatively straightforward.  But in real-time production, conscious attention to the 3rd person singular “s” is a very low priority to the learner, because it contributes absolutely nothing to the meaning, and the learner is going to be primarily focused on accurately conveying their meaning.  It’s not until all these other more important structures have fallen into place that the learner is going to be in a position where they can afford to devote conscious attention to subject verb agreement.

Also, notice that the irregular past forms are learned before the regular past forms.  This seems counter-intuitive at first, but it makes sense once you think about it.  First of all, irregular verbs are a lot more frequent in the input than regular verbs, so learners are exposed to them a lot more.  But secondly, irregular past forms are a lot more noticeable in the input.  You will notice it when “go” changes to “went”, but it is very easy to miss the small /t/ sound at the end of “liked”.

Then, once the learner has acquired the concept of the past tense in English through regular verb, then they’re ready to given attention to the regular past tense form.

Okay, so, talk to your partner.  How do the textbooks we use at this school violate the order of acquisition? How does providing learners with input help to ameliorate this problem?

(SET UP ATTENDEES IN PAIRS.  LET THEM DISCUSS.  THEN FEEDBACK AS A CLASS).

Okay, so the textbook is often going to be trying to force the students to learn grammar points that they’re not ready to learn.  This has the potential to be a problem, but it is less of a problem if the students are provided with a lot of input, and then they can use their own internal mechanisms to acquire the language features in the natural order.

Alright, and one more reason to use input in the classroom, and that’s that the textbook can often be so boring.  And that’s going to put the students off of wanting to learn English, because it fails to capture their attention.  

Whereas if you bring in stories and movies and songs to engage your students, that’s going to increase their interest in learning English, which will ultimately result in greater learning.

Okay, now how can input fit into your curriculum.

There are people, such as Stephen Krashen, who believe that just input by itself is enough for language acquisition.  Krashen thought you don’t even need to teach grammar rules, you can just provide the students with enough input, and the grammar will sort itself out.

This was very popular in the 1980s, and various forms of this argument are still popular today in certain circles.  But it’s also controversial.

What I’m going to argue for today is a dual method, because I believe language acquisition can be attacked from both ends so to speak.  One the one hand you can build up unconscious understanding by feeding the students lots of input, and on the other hand you can build up conscious control of grammar through the PPP approach.

In this approach, in an ideal world, by the time the student is presented with any grammar or vocabulary in a PPP lesson, they’ve already been encountering that same grammar or vocabulary item several times in the input.

In fact in an ideal world, the student has already begun noticing that grammar or vocabulary in the input, and built up somewhat of an understanding of it before the lesson begins.  So that the PPP lesson is not an introduction to new language, but a clarification of language the student has already begun noticing.

For example, here is the type of grammar lesson we should try to avoid if at all possible:

               * Students are introduced to a grammar structure that they have never seen before.

               * The teacher attempts to introduce the grammar structure (form, meaning, pronunciation) and have the students accurately understand it and be able to produce it all in one lesson.

              If the students have never seen the grammar form before, then I don’t think it’s realistic for the students to be able use it in free production at the end of the lesson.  And I think most of us have been in these type of lessons, where we were trying to introduce a grammar point from the textbook that the students had never seen before.  And it’s usually a disaster, right?  The students often have a very hard time understanding how the grammar point is used in real life.

               So, here’s an alternative framework which may be more successful:

               *Over many weeks and months, students are exposed to a large amount of input from the language at a level which they can understand.

               *Over this long period of time, students start to notice several features of the language on their own.

               *Students, consciously or subconsciously, begin to form hypotheses about what the meaning and function of these language structures are.

               *And then at this point, the teacher comes in with a grammar intervention, to help clarify exactly what a certain structure is, and how it is used.

               I think this type of grammar lesson, a lesson where the teacher is clarifying a grammar point the students have already had plenty of exposure to, is going to be more successful than attempting to introduce something completely new.

Now, I need to be clear on this, because the last time I gave this workshop I confused people.  Some people thought I was advocating that they specifically look for input with a particular type of grammar point in it.  But that’s not what I’m saying, and I think that would be almost impossible to do anyway.

Instead, what I’m advocating is that learners be continuously exposed to a wide variety of input.  And if they are continuously getting lots of input from a variety of sources, then all the relevant grammar point should be included in the input anyway, whether these are grammar points that they are going to study in the textbook next week, or next month, or next year.

Okay, right, now on to problems and solutions.  So there are a number of problems with using input in the classroom, in terms of the students’ attention spans and classroom management and whatever.  

So next we’ll discuss what potential problems you could have, and what some solutions to those problems could be.  With a partner, see if you can brainstorm a list of problems, and potential solutions for those problems.

(SET UP ATTENDEES IN PAIRS.  LET THEM DISCUSS.  THEN FEEDBACK AS A CLASS).

Okay, so here’s some of the problems I’ve come up with.

First of all, the input needs to get noticed by the learner in order to do them any good.  I mean, if just listening to input was all it took to acquire a language, then we’d all be fluent in Vietnamese already, right?  Because we hear Vietnamese around us every day.  But actually all of that Vietnamese we hear just goes in one ear and right out the other.

One solution is to choose material that is interesting to the students.

This is, I know, easier said than done.  Sometimes I chose a book or movie that I think the students are really going to enjoy, and they completely hate it.  For another thing, because tastes differ from person to person,  it’s very hard to choose anything that everyone will like.  

But that caveat aside, I think it is still possible to make rough guesses about what students will like.  We all have a rough idea of what kind of material will appeal to our students.

And then once you start the lesson, it’s very easy to tell whether the students are engaged with the material or not.  Especially with children and teenagers, because if they are bored with something, they will not be shy about telling you.

Especially if you’re doing a book or a movie spread out across several classes, a good way to see if you’re students are engaged with the material is to see how they react when you stop it.  Once I was doing the Graded Reader version of Dracula with pre-teen students, and when we got to the end of each chapter, they would go nuts and start begging me to continue with the next chapter.  And that was a good sign that they were engaged with the material.

Or when I’m doing a movie with a class, and when I stop the movie, and they go nuts and yell out “No! Don’t stop it here!  Just 5 more minutes.  Please!”  Then again, that’s a good sign that they’re engaged with the material.

I know in the CELTA we’re taught that we always need some sort of task to go with the material, but if the students are naturally engaged with the material, I’m not so sure you need a task with it.  

I once observed one of the lead teachers at my former school do a reading activity.  He told me in advance that he didn’t like to make the students do a lot of questions, because he said , “The way we make the students do tons of comprehension questions really ruins the enjoyment of reading.”   So in his lesson, he gave the students a chapter out of a book, and just played the CD, and had the students follow along with it, and that was it.  And the students were completely absorbed in that reading the whole time.

Now, you can get away with that only when the material is intrinsically interesting to the students.  If the material is not intrinsically interesting to them, then you’ll have to create some sort of tasks to force engagement.  So, for example, reading a horror story like Dracula is probably going to be of interest to the students, but doing the reading from their textbooks might not be.  

Okay, another problem is that processing anything in a foreign language is extremely cognitively difficult.  Sometimes as teachers we forget this, because we’re talking in our own native language all during the class.  But those of you who are currently studying a foreign language, or attending language classes, will recognize this.  In my own experience, I can listen to something in a foreign language for maybe about 15 minutes before my brain explodes.

The solution is to limit the time duration any one source of input.  I think 10 minutes at a time is about a maximum that the students will be able to handle.  

Then after 10 minutes, give their brain a chance to reset.  If you want to continue to give them more input, then give it to them in a different medium.  For example, do 10 minutes of a movie, give the students a chance to reset their brains, and then do something different like a book or a song.

Right, problem number three, particularly when dealing with young children, is that children have very short attention spans, and can’t sit quietly and listen to the input for long periods of time.

The solution is to limit the time duration of the input even more when dealing with young children.

When I was teaching teenagers, I would show them ten minutes of a movie at a time.  But then when I came to this school, and I started teaching 5 and 6 year old children, I discovered very quickly that they couldn’t sit still for 10 minutes of a movie.  So I had to reduce the movie time down to one minute at a time.

So just adjust the length of the input to whatever the temperament of your class happens to be.  

Another thing I discovered is that while children are not naturally predisposed to sit quietly and listen to something, they can actually do it if you make it worth their while.  So if you give them rewards for sitting quietly, like stickers, or points, or if they can play a game afterwards, or whatever your classroom management system happens to be, then that will help a lot.

Okay, a fourth problem, sitting and listening to input can be a passive activity, and we like to encourage our students to be active.

There are some ways of doing more active activities during input.  One is any TPR (Total Physical Response) during the input.  For example games like “Simon Says” (or “Teachers Says” at some schools).  And if you get creative, you can actually start to introduce a lot of complex vocabulary and grammar with these games--i.e, various conditional sentences like  “Teacher says touch your toes if you’re a boy”

Ideas for Using Input

Reading Stories

This can be done in several ways.  The whole class can read a story together, or students can choose a story to read by themselves during SSR (silent sustained reading) time or reading can be done as homework as part of an extensive reading program.

Reading Together

Many graded readers come with a CD.  The students can listen along and follow the CD as they read.  Or, in cases where the CD is unavailable, the teacher can be the “human CD” and read the story for the students.  Or various students could be nominated to read the story aloud.

For younger students or lower-level students, picture books may be more effective.  For small classes, the students can gather around the teacher and look at the picture book together.  For larger classes, I put the picture book up on a PowerPoint.

SSR (Silent Sustained Reading) time

The teacher provides the class with a variety of choices of reading material.  Students pick whatever interests them, and read it for as long as it holds their interest.  If at any point the students get bored with their reading material, they can exchange it for something different.

Homework (extensive reading program)

Students are instructed to read at home, and keep reading journals on what they read, and how they feel about it.  During class, they can talk in groups about their reading journals for that week.

Poems

For many learners, natural English rhythm and stress patterns are a problem.   (Learners, especially young learners have a limited capacity to consciously study this, but given enough exposure to poetry, they can subconsciously absorb a lot of the rhythm and stress patterns of the English language).  In my classes, I’ve had success using humorous poems with adolescents and teenagers: e.g. Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl

Songs

As with poetry, listening to songs is a great way to absorb English rhythm and stress patterns.  

You don’t necessarily need to design activities around songs.  Simply having the songs on in the background during the lesson can provide lots of exposure.  But you can also do activities.

For younger children:

• Super Simple Songs youtube channel is good.

For older students:

• listen and fill in the gap worksheets
• cut up the lyrics into paper strips, and have the students listen and put them in order
• http://lyricstraining.com/

Watching Movies

This is authentic material, so the students won’t be able to understand everything.  But they will be able to understand some things.  

Don’t play the whole movie at once.  Somewhere between 2 to 5 minutes at a time is probably ideal (depending on how you want to use the movie.)

Suggestions for use:

Give the students the transcript to the movie clip.  Perhaps have them do a gap fill and fill in the missing words.  (Most movie scripts are available on-line).

Many students have problems catching all the words of the movie because of the natural speed of the language.  To encourage bottom-up listening skills, you can have the students read through the words before listening to the movie.  (Or listen first, then read, then listen again.)

For Disney movies, I use the website http://disneyscreencaps.com/ to create little “Story Books” of pictures from the movie combined with the dialogue that students can read through before listening to the movie a second time.

Creating all this is somewhat labor intensive on the teacher’s part, but you can also do a lot of activities around movies that involve very little preparation.  For example:

• Exploit the movie for speaking--discussion, predictions, et cetera
• Focus on some vocabulary occurring in the movie clip.  Pre-teach the vocabulary and then see if the students can identify the vocab in the movie.
• Focus on some sample sentences.

Tip: don’t use subtitles in the students’ native language.  It’s difficult for the human brain to read in one language while listening in another.  If the students are reading the subtitles in their own language, they will tend to tune out the English.  (Although if you’re going to play the same movie clip multiple times, then it’s okay to use subtitles for some of the viewings--as long as the students have at least one opportunity to view the clip without subtitles.)

Jokes

Learning how to play with the language is an important step towards gaining full control of the language.  Jokes, riddles, and puns can help with this.  And although some of these bad jokes can make adults groan, children of a certain age really seem to enjoy stupid jokes.  

I use jokes with either teens or pre-teens of a pre-intermediate level or higher.  I give them one or two jokes a day at the beginning of class.  (Sometimes I make it into a game, and give points for guessing the punchline).  These can be done orally, written on the whiteboard, or can be done with pictures and illustrations on a PowerPoint.

Reading/ Performing Plays

This is a great way to get students actively involved with the input.  Many plays designed for ESL students are already on the Internet.  I’ve had good luck with plays on the British Council Website.

Teacher as a Source of Input

Regardless of what you learned in your CELTA, it’s very important to talk to your students.  This can done as part of a lesson plan (listen to the teacher’s story) or just done informally by chatting to the students a lot throughout the class.

Saying positive things to students is an important part of building rapport with students, so I make it a point to say at least one positive thing to every student every lesson.

Also, at the beginning of the lesson (or coming back from break) I often find my students want to talk about things unrelated to the lesson.  It’s not a bad idea to indulge this for 5 minutes or so before getting into the lesson.  Let them direct the conversation.  The input in this case is the teacher responding to the student’s topic of interest.

Other Students as a Source of Input

Students’ speech will be at the perfect level of comprehensibility to their classmates, and research has shown that students can pick up previously unlearned vocabulary and grammatical structures from their classmates’ speech.   Thus, any activity where they are discussing with each other is an opportunity for input.  This is also an advantage of encouraging an “English only” environment in the classroom.

Unfortunately, research also shows that students can also pick up grammatical and pronunciations from their classmates.  So this type of input should be supplemented by other forms of input.

Student Writing as a Source of Input

As with students’ speech, student writing will likely be at the perfect level of comprehensibility for their classmates, so it’s good to encourage students to read what their classmates have written.

As with speaking, there’s a possibility that the students can absorb errors as well as correct language from their classmates.  To avoid this, the teacher can first collect the students’ writing, re-write it so as to remove all the errors (but without increasing the complexity) and then present it to the classmates.

Using Input in the Classroom

1. Problems with the PPP Approach
1. PPP relies on consciously teaching language rules to students, and expecting students to consciously apply these rules in free production
2. Human attention is limited, and can only be directed at one thing at a time
3. Language contains too many features, and conscious attention can not be applied to them all in free production

e.g. tense, aspect, pronunciation, word stress, sentence stress, voiced and unvoiced allophones (/s/ and /z/, /t/, /d/, and /id/), collocation, register, style, word order, inversion, etc, etc, etc.

D. The syllabus of grammatical forms in the textbook often does not match the learner’s internal syllabus--Order of Acquisition

II. Learning Language Through Input

1. Students provided with sufficient input will be able to develop an implicit understanding of many of the language features without conscious attention

 “…research has shown that learners learn a great deal that no one ever teaches them.  They are able to use their own internal learning mechanisms to discover many of the complex rules and relationships which underlie the language they wish to learn.  Students, in this sense, may be said to learn much more than they are taught.” (Lightbown and Spada p. 116).

     B. This is particularly true for younger learners

“…younger acquirers will tend to have less ability and/or inclination to learn conscious rules.  The amount of homework devoted to conscious learning might therefore vary according to age with adults receiving the most, teenagers somewhat less, and children perhaps none at all. …  Thus a common mistake made in many language courses for children is giving students learning tasks similar to the grammar exercises used by adults.”(Krashen, Terrelll p. 178-179)

III.     How to Combine the Input Approach with the PPP Approach

1. Consciously directing students attention to language features is still useful, but PPP works best if it is used as a clarification and not an introduction.

1.Long before the PPP lesson, the students should have been encountering the language feature in the input, and beginning to make their own hypothesis about its use.

2. The PPP lesson should not be introducing a new language feature to the students, but clarifying the use of a language feature they have already been noticing

3. If the language feature is completely new to the students, it is unrealistic to expect them to use that language feature in free production at the end of only one lesson.

    B. The Ideal Time Line

1. The learner is exposed to input containing the language feature months or sometimes years before that language feature is consciously studied in a PPP lesson
2. After several exposures, the learner begins to notice the language feature in the input
3. The learner begins to form their own hypotheses about the meaning of the language feature, and may even start experimenting with it’s use.
4. It is only at this point that a PPP lesson will be effective

IV Sources of input

--the text book, Story Books, Picture Books, Movies, Songs, Poems, jokes, Reading/ Performing Plays, Students Listening to the Teacher, Students Listening to Each Other, Students Reading Each Other’s Written Compositions

V. Disadvantages of Input (Problems and solutions)

1. Problems

1. Learners have to be engaged with the input in order for it to be beneficial

--If Input by itself was sufficient, we’d all have learned Vietnamese by now

2.   Listening to input is a passive activity--children have short attention spans

3.  Processing something in a foreign language is cognitively demanding--learners will lose attention quickly.

B. Solutions

1. Either choose input the students will naturally be engaged with, or create tasks to force engagement
2. Reduce the amount of input to accommodate the attention span of the learner.

--e.g. older students can watch possibly 10 minutes of a movie, but younger students can probably only handle 2 minutes

3. Make the input more active

--e.g. Listen and Draw, TPR, act out the story, etc.

VI Types of Input

1. Authentic Input
2. Graded Input
3. Negotiated Input

VII. Graded Input

1. What is it?

--Input in which the vocabulary and grammar have been simplified for the learner

2. How much should it be simplified?

1. If the learner knows all the vocabulary, but not the grammar structure, then they can often guess the meaning of the grammar from the vocabulary.
2. If both the grammar and vocabulary are unknown, then comprehension will start to break down.  (Unless the meaning is reinforced with visuals)
3. If the learner knows 98% of the vocabulary, they can usually guess the meaning of the remaining 2% from context.  Any higher percentage of unknown words will cause comprehension difficulties

3. Examples of Graded Material

e.g. Graded reader book series, Picture books, Graded songs, Graded movies (English Short Stories For Kids), Graded Teacher Talk

D. Give Examples of Use

1. Graded Readers

1. Read as class, or do SSR
2. "When avid readers are asked to read required materials. they frequently admitted that 'This makes me not want to read.'"  (Krashen)

1. 
   

VIII. Negotiated Input

1. What it is?

--The learner and the teacher converse.  The learner is able to ask for clarification on anything they do not understand.

     B. Sources of negotiated input:

--The Teacher

     C. Teacher Talking Time is seen as a bad thing on many training courses, but this is perhaps overly dogmatic

“Every trainee I have ever met is convinced that student talking time (STT) should be increased and teacher talking time (TTT) decreased. Since well- directed listening is the best, perhaps unique, way of acquiring the spoken language it is clear that this absurd methodological over-simplification is the precise opposite of the truth in many circumstances. What matters is the kind of TTT, and its purpose, and the strategies and techniques through which it is employed. It is a matter of critical awareness, knowing what you are doing. Regrettably, the simple slogan of initiation courses ignores this and simplifies to the point of absurdity.”-- Michael Lewis

“[during a grammar lesson] teacher talk is actually more valuable [than the actual grammar point] !  When we “just talk” to our students, if they understand, we are not only giving a language lesson, we may be giving the best possible language lesson since we will be supplying input for acquisition.” (Krashen, Terrell p. 35)

D. Qualifications

1. As with all other types of input, students have to be engaged with what you are saying for it to be beneficial--Make talk relevant to the students--i.e. don’t talk to yourself
2. Classroom management (e.g. giving instructions, rewarding good behavior) is essential for surviving the lesson, and not the best time to give complicated input

E. Suggestions

1. Make your talk relevant to the students--talk about them, not you
2. Allow the students to control the conversation by having them ask you questions
3. Make it a point to say something positive about each student during each lesson--this will enable you to be able to control them better if you build up rapport

IX. Authentic Materials  (Songs, movies, Childrens Picture Books)

1. Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Authentic Materials

1. Advantages
1. Rich input containing all the language features
2. Authentic material will contain at least some language that the students can benefit from even if the majority is over their heads
3. Gives students a sense of pride/accomplishment when they understand something from authentic material
4. Gives students the sense that Authentic Material is something they can engage with now instead of waiting until the distant future

2. Disadvantages

1. Learners benefit most when they understand 98% of the vocabulary
2. If neither the grammar or vocabulary is understood, learners do not benefit.

B. Suggestions for using movies

1. Grade the task, not the text
2. Use sparing.  The majority of input in the classroom should come from negotiated or graded input.  

--suggest using somewhere between 2-5 minutes maximum

C. Examples

1. Star Wars Worksheets
2. Disney Movie Worksheets