Use I Love Lucy in Your Next PD for English Language Teaching

I grew up watching I Love Lucy. My family and I gathered in my grandmother's family room every Sunday to snuggle under blankets and watch Lucille Ball's classic comedy gold on VHS.

I didn't realize until I became an ELD and adult ESL teacher how much I learned about teaching across languages by watching I Love Lucy.

Now I show I Love Lucy as English listening practice to my adult ESL learners almost every class.

It's perfect because I teach a 3-hour, level-one English class twice a week, and even the most enthusiastic English learners get exhausted.

The best teaching tool to bring back joy and energy I've discovered this year is to show clips of I Love Lucy as listening practice for my English learners.

But I realized this week as I was watching our evening Lucy clip, that English learners aren't the only adult students who could learn a lot from Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I realized that I Love Lucy is a perfect example of comprehensible input.

That's why my students can enjoy it even though they are just starting to learn English. That's why they enjoy I Love Lucy more and can watch it longer without overwhelm than any other show I've tried.

Take a look at this clip for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9ivqXzmrZ0

This video shows Ricky Ricardo (played by Desi Arnaz) telling a bedtime story in Spanish.

In this clip, Ricky Ricardo is telling a story almost entirely in Spanish. What makes the story delightful and funny is his over the top pantomime, but what makes the story comprehensible is more than that.

In this clip, you can see 3 principles of language teaching at work:

• culturally relevant material

• translanguaging

• multiple modes of input

Imagine showing this clip at a professional development and asking teachers to reflect on which vocabulary they learned from the presentation. They'd probably say "roja" or "lobo" or "ojos" and none of that vocabulary had to be "front-loaded" or explained or taught separately.

So often, we try to find new ways to teach and communicate, but, at least in this case, there are profound examples of great multilingual teaching waiting for us in the past.