We repeatedly discuss here nuances in the amount of L2 we use in the language. Most of us want to at least hit that 90% ACTFL figure, and some of us, Reuben at least, go fully up to 100% use. We strive daily to those ends.
But the discussion on how much we use the target language pales in comparison to another discussion about percentages that we do not have about levels of student participation in our classes. Yes, we discuss how important it is to engage students, to teach to their eyes, to get them all active to some degree in the flow of the discussion, but we haven’t yet set a percentage on that.
I say that figure should be at 100%. If we can’t get that going, it is not unlike a baseball team where, for example, the third baseman refuses to play. When it is time to take the field, he just stands there and balls whiz by him into the left field corner to the detriment of the whole team. When he comes up to the plate, he refuses to swing the bat.
We are like the team manager who is loaded down with so much to do, tending to the ins and outs of the method, and all of the other rapid fire decisions teachers must make, impossibly, all day. We tend to let non-participants go. The head goes on the desk, the kid refuses to play, and we have a situation that is really bad in comprhension based teaching, but that many of us don’t act upon, not that we even can.
Somehow, we must act on those little insults, those little refusals. This year we have identified many roadblocks in our way to good comprehension based teaching. We have gallantly begun to realize that if the method doesn’t work for us it is not due just to some fault in our technique or in us as teachers, as is often the general view out there among most TPRS/CI teachers.
We have bravely learned how to hold students more and more accountable for their actions in our classes, ever since last May when Robert hit the mother lode in the Three Modes of Communication thread that has lasted almost a year now.
We now see, as a result of that discussion and many others now categorized under the heading of mental health, especially, that our overall success in the classroom has much more to do with how we train our kids in our CI classrooms than we have ever realized.
Now, I would like to ask if the real culprit in our stumblings with CI isn’t the kids who refuse to play, whether because they choose not to or simply cannot.
We need to explore this. Someone needs to do a study of the effect of a single student’s refusal to participate on those around him. I think it is much worse than we realize. If a child is simply not equipped for the reciprocal give and take that is required for this kind of work, then what is the real result in overall classroom gains by all students?
I ask, again, can comprehension based instruction even work in schools, and how much of it is due to these incapable students, who suck so much energy right out of the room?