I was getting nervous about Dr. Krashen coming in last week and Diana told me to just not get too “creative” and simply teach using comprehensible input. It was great advice and I recommend it to you if you get observed. I am starting to see lists of CI activities. Fine, but don’t let them turn what we do into a Wal-Mart selection of activities. Doing that can backfire and ruin our fluency programs.
There is comprehensible input and then there is meddling with comprehensible input. When we just do CI, we kick in the powerful unconscious acquisition process (Krashen, Chomsky, Vygotsky). When we meddle with that, we rip the focus away from the meaning onto the vehicle of delivery of the message and it all falls apart. I would say that many of us do that way too much. We meddle. We need to stop. Stop with the English, and stop with the bullshit.
If our students’ minds are not focused on the message, but rather, due to our meddlling, are turned away from the message to focus on a distorted prismatic look at the medium of its delivery, then we are accomplishing nothing. Let’s be honest – we do that all the time.
When I would glance at Dr. Krashen during those classes last week, since my only goal was to deliver CI, I would see him just listening to the French with a kind of contented look on his face. (His French is a lot better than I thought it was). He was a good student that day. Of course I could see that his research side was not missing any of what was going on with the kids on the acquisition side, but he seemed to be enjoying listening to the French.
We must teach our kids that from the beginning of the year how to do that. We must train our kids in the first weeks to absolutely dump everything they ever learned about being in a class.
We must, against all odds (because of the severely detrimental- for CI – training that they have have experienced in their academic careers up to the point when they walk into our classrooms) somehow convince them to just sit back and enjoy listening and reading and that’s it. Good Lord look what has happened to us. We have forgotten how to have fun. We have ripped our childrens’ childhoods away from them.
It greatly concerns me when I hear teachers coming up with all sorts of new ideas and activities about comprehensible input. CI is not complicated and when we make it so we destroy its value. We must let go of the idea of even being teachers.
Teachers have a failed track record in languages. We must learn to do what Diana (thank you Diana!) told me to do with my guests last week, to just bring simple comprehensible input into the room so that it rains down on everybody’s unconscious minds and forget the rest of all of that other bullshit.
