Dr. Liam Printer is the Leader of Pedagogical Innovation and Approaches to Learning at the International School of Lausanne in Switzerland where he also teaches Spanish in the middle and high school. He hosts The Motivated Classroom podcast, which focuses on raising motivation in the language classroom through comprehensible methods of instruction. The podcast has now reached over 160,000 downloads after 78 episodes and is listened to every week in over 95 countries. His Doctorate in Education focussed on motivation and teaching languages through co-created storytelling and his research has been published in two peer reviewed journals. Liam has been invited as the keynote speaker at a number of high profile international language teaching conferences, including the Dynamic Language Learning Conference in the Netherlands, the Irish Association of Spanish Teachers national conference and The Goethe Institute Annual Conference in London. He has worked as an educational consultant focussing on teaching languages with compelling, comprehensible input with schools in Australia, Finland, China, The US, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland.

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.

Sweet 16 Verbs

Learn what the Sweet 16 Verbs are and how to use them to generate questions and maximize comprehensible input to build functional fluency in your students.

Proficiency vs Performance Assessments

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!

Carol  BAUSOR has been battling with the well-nigh impossible task of teaching French adults to speak English for many years.  She feels she has pierced a teeny tiny hole in the cast-iron armour that the majority of French people wear to defend themselves against any onslaught on Francophonia.

As language teachers, it is important to know the mythical reasons people tell themselves in order to explain their language learning failure … so that you can destroy them in the classroom.

Anthony BURGESS (author of « Clockwork Orange ») inspired her to imagine the language classroom as the birthplace of international communication.  We so need that communication at the moment.

Carol ran away from England to France when she was 18 years old to study French for a year. She never quite got around to going back ! Today she has lived in her adopted country for longer than she lived in Britain, so she is not quite sure what nationality that makes her. (Definitely French as far cuisine is concerned ….) What she is sure of, though, is how much pleasure she gets from helping people to enjoy the power of learning. In this workshop will be sharing some foolproof tips and tricks to make sure that you have the answers to questions your students/pupils/parents of students or pupils could ask you about learning a language.

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.

Dr. Thomas received her B.A. from Clemson University in French Literature in 1976 and attended the Sorbonne in 1977. She received her M.A. from the University of South Carolina in French Literature in 1983 and taught at the University of Grenoble in France in 1986. She received her Ph.D. in French Literature from Purdue University in 1991 when she began teaching at MTSU.

Since joining MTSU, Dr. Thomas has chaired National Women’s History Month, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) Committee, and the Loan and Scholarship Committee. In addition, she has served as a member of the Undergraduate Research, Scholarships, and Creative Projects (URSCP) Task Force and coordinated study abroad and summer exchange programs to France. Currently, Dr. Thomas serves on the MTSU Fulbright Committee and is a member of both the Graduate and Honors Faculty.

Her articles and book reviews on nineteenth-century authors appear in the Gale-Thomson Encyclopedia on Short Story Criticism, Romantic Review, L’ Esprit Créateur, and Philosophy and Literature, and her current research on brain-based learning has been presented at international, national, and regional conferences and published in the International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching.

Dr. Thomas is the founder and director of the Center for Accelerated Language Acquisition (CALA), a center for the research and application of brain-based methods of learning.  Housed in the MTSU University Honors College, CALA provides language classes in multiple languages on a year-round basis using comprehensible input techniques.  You can read about the success of CALA students in the International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching

At the Center for Accelerated Language Acquisition (CALA) 5- day language classes are taught, which last three hours per day. TPR interactive activities are used to learn about 200 words, including various points of pop-up grammar the first two days, then TPRS is used in the next two days, which scaffold on another 100 vocabulary words/various points of pop-up grammar, and finally, day 5 is used to create an original student story, then read and answer questions about chapter one of a simplified novel, like Poor Ann. Another 50 words are learned in that context. See CALA research results published in Krashen’s IJFLT here: https://www.mtsu.edu/cala/documents/CALA_article_IJFLT.pdf

Dr. Shelley Thomas is the founder and director of the Center for Accelerated Language Acquisition (CALA). See her bio. here: https://www.mtsu.edu/cala/sthomas.php

In this workshop, Total Physical Response (TPR), as a powerful foundation of TPRS, will be felt by participants in a 1 hour demonstration of Japanese, ending with a quick assessment showing the level of acquisition of vocabulary, pop-up grammar and the skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking.

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.

How to Use Any Picture for Classroom Conversations about any Theme

You know pictures are powerful, but they’re even more versatile than you may realize. Join Justin to learn how to use any picture—even one that seems unrelated—as a lead-in to any theme or cultural topic, helping students think critically and creatively about themselves and others.

Double Polls—My Absolute Favorite Way to Guide Conversations with Any Level of Learners

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.

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.

Dr. Macheo Payne is currently the Executive Director of Community & Youth Outreach (CYO). Dr. Payne is also a social work professor at Cal State East Bay. The program nearest and dearest to Macheo’s heart is the Oakland Freedom School program.

Dr. Payne is a content expert on addressing disparities among African-American and students of color in schools and other social systems. Dr. Payne’s research focuses on finding solutions to systemic inequity at the institutional and program level. Macheo has over 25 years experience as a skilled trainer and facilitator. As a social worker with clinical experience, Macheo has over 15 years experience training clinicians on how to provide mental health & behavioral health support to individuals and groups.

A graduate of UC Berkeley, Macheo also holds an MSW from Cal State University East Bay and a doctorate in educational leadership from San Francisco State University.

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.

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.

Making Magic with Songs as Authentic Resources in the CI Classroom

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.

Sustainable Feedback in the CI Classroom

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.

Empower Language Learners with No Prep-Foldables

Be prepared to guide your learners through active learning acquisition driven experiences with no prep foldables. Foldables are powerful tools to master as these can be used to provide students with more autonomy through skillful scaffolding. Learn how to walk your students through setting up two types of foldables in the target language! Don’t let the printer’s malfunctions or last minute printing (because it happens) ruin your lessons ever again!

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.”

Making a Song Last a Week

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.

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.

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

Ben Fisher is a high school German and Spanish teacher located in Seattle, WA. He has presented at national, regional, and local conferences on lesson planning and high-leverage teaching strategies. He blogs at MrFisherSays.com and is on Twitter @mrfishersays.

What do teachers need to know about their LGBTQ+ students and collleagues?

LGBTQ+ topics remain incredibly relevant in the (inter)national cultural discourse. In this session, we will discuss the experiences of LGBTQ+ students and teachers as they navigate language classrooms today, discovering the language to describe themselves, their lives, and the world(s) they live in.

LGBTQ+ Life in Your Stories, Units, Curriculum

You want to be more inclusive in your curriculum, so that students of all genders and sexualities see themselves and grow in their empathy for others. Great! But maybe you’re getting stuck on the “how?”. Let’s talk ways to include more LGBTQ+ life into your stories, units, and curricula in manageable, actionable steps.