Pixel International Conferences

After teaching Italian in adult and university contexts with a communicative and explicit-grammar teaching focus for nearly 25 years, I was becoming increasingly perplexed as to why my students continued to make mistakes and not learn the correct forms of basic parts of speech (e.g. definite articles). This pedagogical crisis occurred around the same time that I heard Bill VanPatten speak about the failed promises of instructed second language acquisition (SLA)¹. In a nutshell, he claimed that much of what occurs in typical languages classrooms has next to no impact on language acquisition – this resonated strongly with me and I decided to return to SLA research to understand more². What I discovered has led to a complete overhaul of my teaching approach influenced heavily by Krashen’s claims that approaches based on comprehensible input are superior to all others³. In this paper, I will present the compelling case for comprehensible input and describe how I have implemented this in the Italian Studies program at the University of Melbourne through the use of story-listening⁴. I will also discuss student responses to the approach and provide you with a range of suggestions on how to implement this in your own contexts.