Dear Mr and Mrs Smith

So you have parents– or Adminz–going, Johnny ‘s taking Blablabian, and he likes it, and he talks a lot about stories.  But I don’t see worksheets and essays or other homework.  Can you explain your methods?

Sure you can! Here is my take on explaining C.I. to parents.  If you repost please provide a link to this.

Dear Parents or Guardians–

The fruit of your loins is enrolled in my Beginning Blablabian language class.  The language-learning world has changed a lot since you and I were in school, so I thought I’d let you know what we do to help our kids succeed in Blablabian.

In our class, we acquire Blablabian by first making up stories together in Blablabian. I provide the Blablabian, and students the story details. We act out our stories (including dialogue), answer oral questions about our story, and then we read  versions of our story which “recycle” the vocabulary from our story.  We also watch videos and look at pictures which we discuss in Blablabian, and read Blablabian novels written specifically for students.

Our goal is to provide lots of interesting spoken and written Blablabian which students understand, and to re-use these words over and over so students feel comfortable with Blablabian and have lots of chances to pick up the words and grammar.

We know from modern linguistic research that interesting comprehensible input–compelling messages we understand– in the language we are acquiring, allow us to  subconsciously and easily pick up both the vocabulary and the grammar.  It turns out the those grammar worksheets and talking drills which were probably a part of our high-school Blablabian classes do very little to help us pick up language.  Reading and listening do a lot more for both adults and kids.

If your offspring regularly attends and pays attention in class, you can expect your little darling to first understand Blablabian and (a bit later) to start speaking it, beginning with words and phrases and then sentences, the way babies first understand their parents and make simple statemens before getting to complete sentences. If your kid does not speak lots of Blablabian right away, that’s natural and OK: we need lots of input before we can speak, and even in our first language(s), we recognise more words than we can produce.

If you want to help the pride and joy of your adult life to acquire more Blablabian, having them do any of the following will help:

• watching interesting videos in Blablabian, with English subtitles to keep the Blablabian understandable
• reading anything that is both interesting and easy to understand in Blablabian.
• using online platforms such as Dulingo, as long as they are interesting and understandable
• re-reading anything from class and translating it for you

By the end of the year, I am expecting students to write 600-800 word Blablabian stories (without using notes or dictionaries) in one hour; to understand basic written and spoken Blablabian, and to orally respond in Blablabian to basic questions about themselves, family, stories, etc.  The course outline in their binders explains how students are marked.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Yours truly,

Mr John Talkalot

Department of Ancient, Modern, Futuristic and Non-Existent Languages

Yapperville High School, home of the Yap Cats.  GO YAPCAT PRIDE!