Abstract
This lesson development project focuses on providing community college instructors and students of Russian with a series of lesson plans aimed to exemplify The Natural Approach proposed by Krashen and Terrell (1983). The Natural Approach is employed as a model of teaching early comprehension and speaking skills. The project is focused on describing classroom procedures that provide learners of Russian with opportunities to comprehend the target language at levels of lexis and basic communication tasks. The overall goal of the five lesson plans is to increase the opportunities for (1) comprehension of the L2 input and (2) vocabulary learning. The lesson plans include consecutive objectives, interconnected materials, and activities which are aimed at leading novice students of Russian to the effective transition from the early comprehension stage to the early speech production stage. The designed lessons reflect the ACTFL guidelines for Novice Low and Novice Mid sublevels. Each lesson plan contains two demonstrations followed by a series of whole-group and individual comprehension activities. PowerPoint presentations and video clips are included in the demonstrations to provide learners of Russian with more opportunities to comprehend the L2 input. The first four lesson plans include the use Total Physical Response technique compatible with the guidelines of the Natural Approach. The Total Physical Response is employed as an unthreatening and meaningful way to ask learners of Russian to listen to the target language and respond nonverbally. The last lesson vi focuses on providing the learners with guided opportunities to begin producing yes-no answers and other simple words based on their comprehension of the target language.