My CI-story (part two).

Early spring 2017. Norwich Public Library, Norwich, VT. I had been invited by my dear friend, Allison Litten, to attend a workshop led by Elissa McLean, founder and director of Express Fluency. Elissa gave a German lesson, as if we were students in a classroom. I was immediately intrigued. I had never been in a language class where the target-language was used the entire time. I had always (been) taught the target language in English. But this was new. This was different. Elissa wasn’t teaching us about German; she was teaching us German. This was a game-changer.

Le chat voit un chien sur un narval.

Elissa McLean

So compelled was I by this approach to language teaching, that I began to roll it out almost immediately in my classroom. The textbooks went into the cupboard (and then into the recycling bin). Instead of reading dull stories from the textbook about Marie-Claude and Julien, we created our own, with a cast of characters that included ice-cubes, aliens, shadows and narwhals. Instead of memorizing lists of numbers and colors, students were acquiring the language organically, through the stories we made together.