Rachel also regularly presents in workshops and conferences such as, the CI Reeboot, World Language Teacher Summit and the Florida Foregin Language Assosiation.

You can follow her Facebook page Tech for World Language Teachers. Join the Tech for World Language Teachers Facebook group. The group has over 15,000 language teachers who love to collaborate and share ideas and resources.

Looking for more resources for language teachers, check out the Tech for World Language Teachers blog.

For On-Demand workshops and No-Prep resources visit the World Language Teacher Tech Academy.

Must-Have Tech Tools for Teaching with Comprehensibly

This session will cover the latest tech tools for teaching using CI strategies.

You love to create lesson plans that provide comprehensible-input to your students and support their proficiency journey but you don’t want to spend countless hours doing that. In this session, I will share with you how to craft an impactful lesson plans that provide a ton of CI to your learners while cultivating cultural competence.

In his free time, he likes spending time with family, hanging with his 3 dogs, traveling, and doing photography.

There are two types of assessments we can do in our classroom outside of simple pencil and paper quizzes and exams: proficiency-based and performance-based. What’s the difference? And why is one so much better than the other for both teachers and students? You’ll find out in this session!

Elicia Cárdenas is a former middle school Spanish teacher with extensive experience teaching a variety of levels, ages, and subjects. Her experience includes working with preservice teachers at Westminster College and teaching assistant for MIT Teaching Systems Lab and writes for the Education Ethics program at Harvard. Although she was trained as an elementary teacher, she shifted her focus to understanding of second language acquisition and its application to classroom instruction in a world language classroom. She presents regularly at national, regional, and state conferences and is proud to be a member of the IFLT coaching staff. Her areas of expertise include assessment with an equity lens and working to make sure all students are successful at acquiring another language. She is the Director of Training for The Comprehensible Classroom, and is the founder of the Deskless Classroom.

Nothing is more motivating than success. In this session, we will look at instructional moves that build confidence and motivation for students in the world language classroom, with a focus on supporting students who often feel left behind in world language classes. Teachers will leave with simple, easy to implement strategies that can be used at all levels and in all languages.

This session is for those teachers who work with beginners language learners that they see once or twice a week and who want to use level 1 novels but don’t know where to start. With concrete examples, we will look at how to teach a novel easily while creating more reading materials with our students using a combination of StoryListening with parallel stories.

Decolonizing our Language Classrooms – First Steps in the Process

Education is a political act. We are either in favour of the status quo or against it. What are we doing as world language educators to disrupt those practices that perpetuate inequalities? How can we make our language classes more inclusive while respecting interculturality?

In this workshop we will talk about what decolonizing means and how this could look like in our language classes. We will talk about history, colonization, today’s ways of colonization, and ways to start a decolonizing process in our language classes.

Teaching with CI novels

Classroom novels are a very powerful tool to take students through a cultural journey that will open doors for them to see and understand a culture different from theirs. When reading a novel as a class we are also helping students with their process of language acquisition. We are facilitating a deeper understanding of the story, and we are giving them tools to make stronger connections and build robust mental representations.
For this experience to be successful some steps should be followed. In this workshop we will talk about different activities and experiences that will allow the teacher to scaffold the process of reading a novel as a class.

MovieAsk basics with question-asking and readings

Panel Discussion:  The door to Interculturaility
Adriana Ramirez with Haiyun Lu, Claudia Elliott, Ben Fisher, Benjamin Tinsley, Dahiana Castro

Ten years of research on TPRS, distilled into slides you can actually share with your students to motivate them to trust comprehension-based learning… or use to advocate for your curriculum with administrators and colleagues!

Martina has been published in The Language Educator and presents regularly at state, regional and national conferences in addition to consulting with individual districts and organizations. Her newest project for supporting teachers is the Garbanzo App, an interactive library of stories in Spanish designed specifically with language classes in mind.

As teachers transition to a Comprehension-Based, Proficiency-Oriented model for teaching language, they need assessments that accurately reflect what their students can do. In this workshop, the presenter will share easily adaptable assessment formats for Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening.

Dahiana Castro teaches high school Spanish and French in Long Beach, California. She has a Masters degree in Multi-cultural Education and Second Language Acquisition. She was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in Puerto Rico. She moved to California in 2005. She has been teaching Spanish and French for Fluency Fast since 2019 and training teachers in Comprehension-Based Methods since 2017. She is a member of the COACH Foreign Language Project in Southern California and in her spare time she crochets, dances Salsa, travels, runs and grades papers.

Backward Planning Song Lyrics

Music is a great to acquire vocabulary and to expose students to culture. In this session in this session, we will teach you how to use authentic song lyrics as text. We will teach the steps of selecting and planning the vocabulary, how to create a story using the vocabulary from the lyrics, how read the lyrics and listen to the song in many ways and other activities.

Using Current Events As Story Starters

Alpacas escaped from the zoo? Snake found in the sofa? Using unusual current events and images as compelling story starters.

Personalizing Pre Scripted Stories

Co-create a basic story in French with collaboration from the students and to use their contributions to hold their attention and build a positive classroom culture.

Afro-Latin Americans and the Harlem Renaissance

Compelling Culture: How to make most culture topics understandable to novice learners by simplifying the language.

Play a game, guess a riddle, acquire the language

In this session, Dahiana Castro and Carla Tarini will show you how they adapted a familiar guessing game into a fully engaging, multi-purpose CI activity that will have your students listening intently, reading/building pictures in their minds, and squirming in their seats to shout out the answer. Students will beg to play it for the entire period. This game also naturally develops circumlocution skills, creates a bridge from novice to intermediate levels, and provides opportunities for writing and speaking if students are ready. We will demonstrate with examples based on the forthcoming series, À Quoi je pense? / En Qué estoy pensando? however, teachers can easily follow the format in class based on our demo. In English with examples in Spanish and French.

CI in Survival Mode: Strategies for the most difficult years

Last year was hard. This year was even harder. I can show you practical strategies for making next year much easier. In the session, participants will learn how to provide input in a way that matches the challenges of the current moment. You can do this, I can help you.

Maybe you already poll your students on their preferences as a way to get conversation going. But do you Double Poll them? Come learn this tweak of class surveys that can make any topic more interesting and lead to many more—and more compelling—conversations.

Ben’s recent work has focused primarily on leveraging language acquisition and language education toward developing global literacy and 21-Century competencies.

Attendees will take away concrete practices to foster student intercultural proficiency using CI methods. Teachers will be able to center the voices of the African diaspora, as well as indigenous peoples and other historically marginalized identities in ways that are accessible at any level.

Songs are powerful authentic resources in our CI classroom! Find a song and transform it to an engaging acquisition experience for your students. Discover new ways to connect your learners to the target culture through leading students to discover new artists, making lyrics comprehensible, and providing interactive acquisition driven activities.

Participants will examine three engaging strategies to facilitate a meaningful connection with music in the target language from the target culture.

John Sifert has been a Spanish teacher in Iowa and Texas for the past 24 years. His focus in the classroom is to provide comprehensible input through stories, novels, and song. He is also passionate about teaching students about life-long skills such as perseverance, respect, and kindness.

John creates a variety of classroom materials and is the author of La isla más peligrosa, La decisión más peligrosa, Seis nombres, L’isola più pericolosa del mondo, with several other novels in the works.

Nothing is more important than family, so when not focused on language acquisition, John spends all his free time with his wife and 5 children in the tiny, (but amazing) town of Belmond, Iowa.

“World language teachers teach the world more than language.”

Using Readlang.com for Presenting Music in the Classroom

This will be a demonstration on how to use the website readlang.com to help present music and music videos as comprehensible input. Discussion can expand on other methods of using music in the classroom. Presentation will be in English with examples in Spanish, but useful for any language.

Making a Song Last a Week

How to use activities to make a single song last for an entire week of input. Since it is only a 15 minute session, it will not discuss the justification of why songs are an important addition to CI instruction, but will get straight to how to add songs into your curriculum. Presentation will be in English with examples in Spanish, but useful for any language.

You Can Develop and Maintain a Successful FVR Program

Avoid false starts with your free voluntary reading program, and even if it has flopped, you can get it back on track with these fast and effective techniques. Bryce will steer you to practices and products that will make it work. He’s had his students reading avidly for years and now he observes and coaches teachers. He knows a lot because he’s seen a lot. You’ll get the help you need here.

What?! C.I. and Grammar?

Why, how, and when to teach grammar in a C.I. classroom is always in the back of your mind. Years of experimentation, observation, discussion and coaching of teachers have given Bryce insight into what works and why when it comes to grammar instruction. You’ll find out his secrets in this fast-paced session. Hold on tight, we’re going to move quickly! It’s Ok, though because you can re-watch it and get those tidbits you might miss.

In this session, Dahiana Castro and Carla Tarini will show you how they adapted a familiar guessing game into a fully engaging, multi-purpose CI activity that will have your students listening intently, reading/building pictures in their minds, and squirming in their seats to shout out the answer. Students will beg to play it for the entire period. This game also naturally develops circumlocution skills, creates a bridge from novice to intermediate levels, and provides opportunities for writing and speaking if students are ready. We will demonstrate with examples based on the forthcoming series, À Quoi je pense? / En Qué estoy pensando? however, teachers can easily follow the format in class based on our demo. In English with examples in Spanish and French.

Celebrating indigenous voices in the language classroom

This session is for teachers who want to celebrate indigenous voices by using indigenous narratives and legends as sources of accessible reading material and mentor texts in narrative writing.

 Teaching level 1 novels through parallel stories

This session is for those teachers who work with beginners language learners that they see once or twice a week and who want to use level 1 novels but don’t know where to start. With concrete examples, we will look at how to teach a novel easily while creating more reading materials with our students using a combination of StoryListening with parallel stories.

Feedback is a gift that leads to growth and student agency. Such gift in the language classroom must be given in an empowering way and received with appreciation. Feedback can also be daunting to the instructor, but it does’t have to be. By empowering learners to effectively self-reflect & provide peer feedback, feedback becomes more meaningful to learners, but learners must be taught to provide quality feedback as well as to receive it with appreciation. In this session, participants will be invited to challenge their perspectives on feedback by exploring highly three practical strategies to introduce feedback & to facilitate effective and engaging self reflection & peer feedback classroom experiences.

John creates a variety of classroom materials and is the author of La isla más peligrosa, La decisión más peligrosa, Seis nombres, L’isola più pericolosa del mondo, with several other novels in the works.

Nothing is more important than family, so when not focused on language acquisition, John spends all his free time with his wife and 5 children in the tiny, (but amazing) town of Belmond, Iowa.

“World language teachers teach the world more than language.”

This presentation will show how to use activities to make a single song last for an entire week of input. Since it is only a 15 minute session, it will not discuss the justification of why songs are an important addition to CI instruction, but will get straight to how to add songs into your curriculum. Presentation will be in English with examples in Spanish, but useful for any language.

Why, how, and when to teach grammar in a C.I. classroom is always in the back of your mind. Years of experimentation, observation, discussion and coaching of teachers have given Bryce insight into what works and why when it comes to grammar instruction. You’ll find out his secrets in this fast-paced session. Hold on tight, we’re going to move quickly! It’s Ok, though because you can re-watch it and get those tidbits you might miss.

Carla Tarini lived in Nice, France for several years after college and has been teaching French to students of various ages ever since. She discovered teaching with Comprehensible Input 10 years ago and became a CI presenter, coach, and trainer. Carla has written hundreds of short, engaging, comprehensible stories for her students. Her first published series, Qui Parle Français?, introduces readers to French speakers from across the globe. She is currently working on another non-fiction series, À Quoi je pense? which will also be available in Spanish, En Qué estoy pensando?

Qui Parle français? — Incorporating the series in your lower level classes

In this session, Carla Tarini, will share some dynamic yet low-prep ways of including the figures of the Qui Parle français? series into your lower level curriculum. Activities described include twists on several CI favorites, such as 3-ring circus, passwords, and listen & draw. If time, she will also share a template that can be used first for scaffolded writing which then can be turned into a dynamic listening/reading/grabbing/rejoinder game! In French and English.

Play a game, guess a riddle, acquire the language

In this session, Dahiana Castro and Carla Tarini will show you how they adapted a familiar guessing game into a fully engaging, multi-purpose CI activity that will have your students listening intently, reading/building pictures in their minds, and squirming in their seats to shout out the answer. Students will beg to play it for the entire period. This game also naturally develops circumlocution skills, creates a bridge from novice to intermediate levels, and provides opportunities for writing and speaking if students are ready. We will demonstrate with examples based on the forthcoming series, À Quoi je pense? / En Qué estoy pensando? however, teachers can easily follow the format in class based on our demo. In English with examples in Spanish and French.

Karen Rowan is the founder and administrator of the IFLT / NTPRS / CI Teaching Facebook Professional Learning Community of 12,000+ teachers.

​She is the author of Las aventuras de Isabela, Isabela captura un congo, ​Carl no quiere ir a México, ​Don Quijote: El último caballero, El callejón del beso (also in French, English, Latin, Russian and Italian) published through Command Performance Language Institute; The Fluency Fast Guide to Self-Coaching, Reader’s Theater for the World Language Classroom, TPR Stories for Paso a paso 1 and 2 and TPR Stories for Realidades 1 and 2. She became the owner of Command Performance when Contee Seely retired in 2019, and now distributes for an additional 35 independently published authors of CI novels.

​She has taught elementary, middle, high school and college as well as adults through Fluency Fast Language Classes using Comprehension-Based methods. For more than 20 years she has trained teachers nationally and internationally. Rowan presents inservices on TPR Storytelling, Comprehension-Based Methods, Reader’s Theater, Self-Coaching for teachers, Adapting the Textbook, Curriculum Development, Storytelling and Personalization. Her school district inservices range from one day through two semesters of training, curriculum development and in-class demonstrations and coaching.

​Rowan created the original Coaching workshops within the National TPRS Conference and was the director of NTPRS for 5 years. In 2008 she was one of the founding members of the International Forum on Language Teaching, IFLT. In 2020 she hosted the CISOS fundraiser for teachers transitioning to online teaching. In 2021 Adriana Ramírez, Dahiana Castro and Karen Rowan launched the first #CIReboot. 

Pre-recorded sessions

Scaffolding Mini-Stories to get to 90% Comprehensible Input,

How to create a text story

What is a Reading Walk?

Using audio books to rest your voice while they act it out, read it simultaneously or draw it