This month, Classroom Voces and Teacher’s Discovery are spotlighting authors who’ve turned their real classroom experience into comprehensible readers for World Language classrooms. These are stories born from real teaching experience—written to engage students, build language skills, and deliver results in the classroom.
Meet: John Sifert
John Sifert is a Spanish teacher in Iowa who focuses on providing Comprehensible Input through stories, novels, and songs. He is also passionate about teaching students about life-long skills such as perseverance, respect, and kindness. John has presented at many state, online, and national conferences and has created a variety of classroom materials. He is the author of the Lo más peligroso series and various other novels that are focused on compelling stories for students.
Author of: Lo más peligroso series (La isla más peligrosa, La decisión más peligrosa, El secreto más peligroso, La mentira más peligrosa)
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Why did you decide to start writing comprehensible readers?
When I first started using comprehensible readers about 20 years ago, there were only about 30-40 readers available. Most of these seemed to be based off of traditional units in a textbook. In those novels there was explicit focus on physical description, using a variety of colors, emotions, place names, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, these are important elements for students to know, but students could quickly see through the purpose of these novels- they seemed like an extended activity based on a textbook- and that just wasn’t interesting to my students. The novels were comprehensible, but not compelling.
So in 2017, I decided to write my own. I wrote La isla más peligrosa (the first in the “Lo más peligroso” series) to be focused on a compelling plot before anything else. I wanted it to be a story that my students would want to read in their native language, not just in Spanish class. After writing it, I made sure the language was sheltered enough for a level 1 or 2 Spanish class. I received great feedback from my students, and a year later, I published it. Since then, I have written and published 5 more readers, and I have ideas cooking for at least a dozen more.
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What inspired you to write the "Lo Más Peligroso" series?
Many of my students love reading and watching mysteries. Nothing beats a mystery with a great twist ending. “Lo más peligroso” is a twisty, cerebral mystery series that tests the bonds of family.
The first book starts off with 3 members of the Sifuentes family in a plane crash on an island off the coast of Uruguay. The family struggles with daily survival, the hope of rescue, and the realization that one of the other survivors wants to make sure they never get off the island. And of course there are snakes. In fact, this real-life island has an average of one snake per square meter!
The stakes ramp up even higher throughout the series. By book 4, the reader has met all seven Sifuentes members, and the fate of the world is now in their hands.
This series is extra special to me because the seven members of the Sifuentes family are based on the seven members of my own family. Some of the names have changed for simplicity, but the personalities, interests, and hearts are still the same.
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How do you teach your own books? Do you have a favorite activity or lesson you use when teaching them?
I LOVE teaching my own novels, and not just because my students tell me these books are their favorites in my classroom library. I know the stories so well that I can help guide my students on a deep journey that goes beyond just practicing a language. I have created so many activities for the first novel unit, that I have published a teacher’s guide for it as well.
One of my favorite activities is having students make predictions at each of the cliffhanger moments in the book. Making predictions, reading the next chapter, and then discovering if those predictions come true is SUPER-compelling for students. It builds excitement, creates engagement, and brings students satisfaction when they can guess where a story is going. They quickly forget that this novel’s purpose is for acquiring language. They are more interested in finding out what happens next; and even better, they forget that they are doing it in another language.
I have seen amazing gains with my students using both whole class novels and a Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) program. In my opinion, reading is the key element for our students to keep acquiring a world language.
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Anything else you'd like to share?
I believe our main goal of teaching world languages is to give our students a solid base in the language AND set up our students to continue their language journey after they leave our school system. Comprehensible, compelling reading is the key to that.
Check out works by John Sifert by clicking here.
Visits John Sifert’s website, padredecinco.com.
