Janique Vanderstocken has been teaching Dutch in Ghent (Belgium) for over 40 years. For many years, she worked with adult learners who were illiterate both in their mother tongue and in the Latin alphabet. Today, she teaches adults who can read and write but who have had very little formal schooling and are therefore not accustomed to learning in a traditional, school-based way.
With learners who have little school experience, traditional teaching methods are often ineffective. This is why Comprehensible Input (CI) is particularly well suited to her context. By using stories as the starting point of her lessons, Janique provides meaningful and engaging language input that supports natural language acquisition. Rather than focusing on grammar explanations or drills, she prioritizes storytelling, singing, and interaction.
Janique almost never shares a common language with her students, which means translation is not an option in her classroom. This reality led her to develop creative strategies to make Dutch fully comprehensible without translating.
In 1985, she completed a Total Physical Response (TPR) training, which strongly influenced her teaching. Her later introduction to the CI approach was a true turning point. As she likes to say: “Once you go the CI way, you never want to go back!”
In addition to teaching Dutch to adult second-language learners, Janique also provides professional development for teachers at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Continuing Education and has presented at numerous conferences across Europe.
At this conference, Janique will lead a Dutch language lab entirely without translation, offering participants a hands-on experience of how Comprehensible Input works in practice.