Many language teachers want their students to learn with comprehensible input (CI), but without explaining to them what it is. Though it can be a challenge to explain the research and the Communication Standard, it’s essential that you do that in order to get the student buy-in you need for CI to work in your classroom. When your students know why you are teaching them in the way you are, they become better students.

Just read from the scripted notes in this book to accomplish that goal. Many students appreciate learning how and why you teach, what your expectations are, how they will be graded in your class, etc. Even the students who don’t care benefit, because once you’ve explained how the class works in detail, they don’t have any excuses for behaving in ways that don’t reflect what is said in the posters.

When students start realizing how much language they are actually learning from you, the posters will allow them to know why. It’s a win-win for them and for their parents and also for your school administrators, who because of these posters will be able to talk intelligently about why one of their teachers is using CI, which awareness is not always the case in most schools.

Putting the posters on your class website also provides you with a good reference point when talking to parents. You can mention in an email, for example, to the parents of a disengaged or misbehaving student that the expectations are clearly there on your website in poster form.

You can have parents locate the posters on their computers and then have substantive conversations with them about their child’s performance in your class. For example, Poster #3 clearly explains how your students are graded - there won’t be a need for you to explain all that to them from scratch. You will have shared talking points for your discussions.

When you make your students think metacognitively about the posters, things change.