CI IA 2018 Heritage Speaker Presentation

Comprehensible Input Iowa- the PD we all deserve

If you haven’t heard about CIIA (Comprehensible Input Iowa), look it up here! Te prometo that you won’t be disappointed. I could go on forever about this conference (and I will later).

Truth is this is the teacher-grown, professional development we all deserve as world language teachers. You see and meet teachers from many languages, many teaching approaches in the CI

world, and everyone is there with the intent to SHARE what they do. There is a genuine feeling of community. The love and support is great. It makes you feel ready to get back in the classroom... in the second week of June.. three days after you just got done teaching... IT’S THAT GOOD.

I have been able to go to two of the three CIIA conferences and presented at both to build up as much good karma as I can; if I’m honest, I need a lot of good karma... I teach more than 400 students every two days.

2018: Heritage speakers in a CI Classroom

This year I presented on what I did with my “heritage speakers” in my CI classroom. I am refining the presentation to get a more in-depth toolkit result (I can try X in my classroom now). This presentation focuses on where the struggle really is for CI teacher with heritage students and a few things I’ve done (with varying degrees of success) to serve my students better. It also talks clearly about the difference between heritage and native speakers; each group having distinct needs from the other.

To have a really productive conversation with your admin, you need to have a clearly defined problem/solution going in to the conversation. Research shows that native and heritage students need a separate class from L2+ learners. For many of our schools, we don’t have the scheduling ability for a separate class (low numbers, departments of one, etc.).

The current solution seems to be to move kids to a more advanced level and hope it works. I did this at my small school and it was kind of helpful. There were still a lot of gaps for all students in that room. This presentation addresses ways to serve students instead of trying to fit them in somewhere.

I am lucky and have the student population numbers and a supportive admin to have heritage classes. I will write about how these classes work. I do need to be clear that not all Spanish-speaking students are in this class.

Here is the link to my presentation from this session. I appreciate any feedback and push-back. We are all learners here. I failed and did not cite the research for each of my suggestions. Most of the research came from the Teachers of Spanish as a Heritage Language Symposium in 2018. It was great to listen to current approaches and research. Most of it is geared to college-level and there are undertones of CI happening in some of the communicative roots.