Here is a question from Karen Olson about personal interviews. She is well on her way to combining the components of TCI, but is worried that the process is taking too long:

“I feel good about having established my class expectations/procedures/participation grading, Free Voluntary Reading, Kindergarten day, music listening/cloze activities, rejoinders and weekly password/greeting each student at the door. I never thought I could actually greet each student!
“I also feel that I’m making some progress with my PQA skills and Special Person.
“I feel like I’m able to see a pattern of high frequency verbs that are coming up spontaneously but in context and that I can see how they can be recycled throughout the year. I see overlaps in vocabulary in the kindergarten books, songs, Free Voluntary readers, PAT daily check-in in French and special person interviews that I never saw before.
“My problem is that I still haven’t finished interviewing all of my 36 students in each class. I feel like at this point I should be starting TPRS… that I’m behind and not starting reps on targets, movie talk or anything else. It all takes me so long!
“Thank you! Karen”

Hi Karen,

It can take a long time to interview students with comprehensible input, if you are doing it right.

If you march right through the interviews, following your own agenda instead of the rhythm of the class, you may complete your lesson plan, but you will rush past most of your students. They will begin to disengage from the process. This will start a downward spiral. Your kids will not be able to understand or produce as much language as you think they should, and you will feel like they are behind. So you will try to cover more material. You will go faster and get more ‘serious’ about your teaching. The students will enjoy it less and will acquire less. To save your self esteem you will begin to complain how lazy and stupid the doggone kids are these days (Ain’t it awful?). Eventually you will abandon teaching with comprehensible input because it “just doesn’t work for my personality.” You may disguise the abandonment of SLA theory and best practice by saying something like, “I prefer an eclectic approach”, but what you will really mean is “I know that students do not acquire language by comprehensible input so I am giving up on that and switching back to vocabulary lists and grammar explanations in English and making them practice until they get it, no matter how many conjugations they need to write, the knuckleheads!”

But your comments show that this will not happen to you, Karen. It sounds like you are integrating many of the components of TCI well. You understand how the pieces fit together and you are developing the skills to teach with comprehensible input. You have the theoretical framework and now you are putting in the time and practicing the skills to make everything work. It takes time to coordinate it all, doesn’t it? Teaching this way is much more energy and focus than the teaching model I had as a beginning teacher of “Sit down, shut up and do your worksheet,”—every day. Every day. Every day. Some of our fellow world language teachers still operate under a similar model today.

Go easy on yourself regarding the personal interviews and not getting to every kid yet. I understand the feeling because I have only interviewed 13-15 students in each class so far as well (most of my classes have about 30 students), and sometimes I feel like I am not being inclusive enough too. I want everyone to have a voice, but I also want everyone to have their say when it is their turn; I am still looking for a better way to do it.

If you want to start with stories, go ahead. You ca do both interviews and stories. In my classes we have been doing many of the same activities you describe above: FVR, Personal Interviews, music, passwords, rejoinders and Kindergarten reading, but no big stories yet, just story snippets, mini-stories and scenarios commenting about kids. We just started the La Llorona embedded readings this week and we have had a lot of fun acting with that, especially the whining, crying kids driving the mother crazy by tugging at her and screaming that they are hungry, they want to eat and they want to see their dad.

The integration of the most frequently used verbs, as you mentioned, is a sign that your awareness and skills are developing. If those verbs are coming up spontaneously you are doing plenty of things right. You are going deep, not broad and shallow. Keep doing that. Students need a LOOOOOOOOOOOOT of comprehensible, compelling input to acquire language. And one of the best ways to deliver that kind of CI, as you know, is with interviews. Kids want to know about each other. They want to know where they fit in. They need help defining who they are, and getting glimpses into the lives of classmates via personal interviews is a superb way of doing that.

There is plenty of time for stories. I love stories. Stories are my default mode and I always come back to a story somehow. If you want to tell stories, go ahead and start, but there is no rush. There is time to tell stories. The key is keeping it comprehensible and compelling, which it sounds like you are doing.

You are doing it right and you will be OK. Keep up the good work and keep in touch.

Best regards, Bryce