About This Site

TPRS/CI

TPRS(Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling), and CI (Comprehensible Input) are by far the most effective second language teaching method I've found. While there is a lot of information online that you can look up(and I encourage you to do this), I will attempt to boil it down to the key idea. To progress in a language, students only need a few things

1. Lots of input (hearing or reading the languages)
2. To understand all the input they are being given.
3. Understanding is made easier by limiting the amount of vocab used, NOT by sheltering them from grammar
4. For the input to be interesting enough to keep them motivated to continue

While I only recently discovered this method, I immediately noticed the difference in my Japanese classes. Students that had been really struggling suddenly lit up, overjoyed that they were actually understanding. My more advanced students are no longer bored, because the stories keep them interested and learning, even if they are a little easy.

For a much better and more in depth exploration of TPRS, I would highly recommend checking out Alina Filipescu's extensive blog post.(Thanks Alina!)

About the stories

The stories on this site are created for and/or with my students. Included is a vocab list including all the words in the story. For all of my stories, I include all the kanji that would regularly be used in Japanese. I find kanji can really help the students recognize words through all the different conjugations. As kanji generally takes time to master, I include furigana above all the kanji and katakana that appears in my stories. The stories are checked by myself and my wonderful Japanese wife before being uploaded here. I hope that soon we will get some variety by having other teachers volunteer to share some of their successful stories.