In an interesting conversation I had one summer with the amazing Beniko Mason about her Story Listening approach, I asked her how she knew her students understood the stories. She said something like: "I just know when they don't understand". That didn't strike me as unusual, because I often feel like I 'just know' when my students don't understand. What struck me as kind of shocking was the general idea that 'teachers just need to tell stories'. Why was that shocking to me? Because most of the (non-CI) language teachers I meet have no idea whether the input they deliver (if any) is actually comprehensible to their students. I shudder with the thought of these teachers 'just telling stories' to their poor, confused students.
So even though I'm open to and interested in this (for me) other take on language acquisition through stories, I do feel that a teacher needs to possess certain skills before even trying to 'just tell stories'. One of those skills, and maybe the most important one, is recognizing when your students don't understand what you are saying. In TPRS, we lay great emphasis on comprehension of every single word. We strive for 100% comprehension, at least in class situations where you can use translation as a means to establish the meaning of words and sentences. Whether this is always the single best approach or whether one can allow for a little 'noise' in the input is another topic that I will address in a later post, but for this post I will assume that our common goal as CI language teachers is to make the input as comprehensible as possible.
Because of the '100% comprehension' requisite in a TPRS class, one of the first skills a new TPRS teacher learns is how to check for comprehension. As a teacher trainer, I therefore dutifully instruct my trainees to check for comprehension often. But now I realize I hardly do explicit comprehension checks in my own classes anymore. In the 9 years that I have been teaching through TPRS, I have gradually learned to see when students don't understand. It is almost as if I can feel it when the message doesn't come through. I have learned to be in tune with my students and to make sure everyone understands everything I say. In a new group, I will do more comprehension checks during the first several classes, until I can read my students and know when they do not understand. My students are adults, they will not show any of the typical behavior of younger children - who will wriggle and get restless when they are confused - so I need to learn to read each individual more carefully.
Back in the old days when I was learning TPRS, I used to diligently do comprehension checks and I thought I was doing it well, but looking back I should have done even more. I know now that I must have been talking over my students' heads a lot. Doing comprehension checks helped me realize that. The comprehension checks were a tool for me, as a teacher, to realize I was going too fast. For many language teachers coming from a 'regular' way of teaching languages, it takes a long time to see just how little students understand if the teacher speaks at a normal speed and does not explicitly clarify the meaning of what s/he says. It takes a looooong time for many teachers to really, really get this, and it requires specific feedback. That feedback is what comprehension checks deliver. They are feedback for the teacher. They help the teacher learn to realize what is comprehensible and what not. They help the teacher learn to recognize signs of incomprehension. They are what a beginning TPRS/CI teacher needs to do in order to be able to deliver CI.
At this point in my teaching career, and in the small groups of adult students I teach, what I do is look for signs of possible confusion, of incomprehension. As soon as I detect any delay in answers, anything like a puzzled look, blank stare or signs of a grinding brain, I immediately do one of these things:
Check with myself whether I used a word that may be unknown to them, and then ask them if the word/phrase I just said is not clear. Then I write it on the board with the translation and repeat what I had said before.
If they seem confused by a complex question, I'll ask: "was this too complicated?" If that is the case, I'll say: "Ok, wait, relax" and ask several easier questions that will lead them up to the more complex question.
When I realize I was talking too fast, I will ask: "Did I go too fast?" and repeat the same thing more slowly and with (already known) gestures.
I will simply ask the group: "What did I just say?" when I'm sure that SOME students have understood.
So at this point, I use comprehension checks to find out if my estimations of what they are confused about are right, so I can take the necessary actions to make my language comprehensible again. Many times, my intuitions are correct, but sometimes they are not (students may have understood but are simply thinking about what answer to come up with), so it's still useful for me to check.
In a high school class, where students are 'trained' to look as disinterested as they can to whatever the teacher is doing or saying, it may take much more explicit comprehension checks to find out if they seem tuned out because they don't understand, because they don't like it or simply because that is the attitude they are used to having in class. It may take a much longer time before the students trust the teacher enough to show comprehension, and it may take much longer before the teacher can rely on his/her ability to 'read' the students. So, every situation, teacher and group of students is different and will require a different number and form of comprehension checks.
Last but not least, I want to make clear that I have never used and would never use comprehension checks as a ways of putting individual students on the spot, and in our teacher trainings I warn explicitly against using them in that way. Comprehension checks are, in my view, always either a classical activity where all students respond as one, or a differentiation technique that allows students (also the barometer students) to show off what they know. In a more general sense, comprehension checks only serve the purpose of showing the teacher how well s/he does in making things comprehensible.
In general, I do believe that if a teacher is very sensitive to signs of confusion, and if the students are 'readable’, comprehension checks can be limited to a minimum. I also believe that, for experienced CI teachers, it is always worthwhile to check every now and then if our intuitions about comprehension are still right, or if we need to adjust them. In my view, the comprehension checks are there to help us teachers know if we are still delivering real CI.
For beginning CI teachers, therefore, I would in all cases strongly recommend starting out with lots of comprehension checks. It helps us become better teachers. It helps us deliver input that is really comprehensible. And it helps us get to a place where we might not need to do so many comprehension checks anymore, whether it be in TPRS classes, during Story Listening or whatever CI activity teacher and students prefer.
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by Kirstin Plante
With thanks to Anny Ewing of Altamira Language Learning for her help :-)
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