Teachers present new vocabulary in the language to be learned. The students hear a sentence again and again. They see us hold up an item and say a word until they understand we are identifying the piece of clothing. Students may join in the skit and put on the clothes themselves to add hands-on participation to the lesson. This helps new words to stick with the students.
Teachers present the lesson entirely in the target language.
We know that immersion is good, because that is the way we learn most quickly. We all learned our first languages by being totally surrounded by people who were at first saying things we did not understand. This was important for our team, because top teach orally is our only option. There is no standard written form of Bishop Paiute. We were also searching for a way to teach quickly and well, and CBI sounded very promising.