To repeat: learning is a completely unconscious process, as Krashen has shown us, but we ignore that, and so we get nowhere in our teaching. We water down Krashen. Our interpretation of his work turns muddy and so our work turns muddy. And then we wonder why comprehension based instruction doesn’t work for us.
In my view, few teachers who claim to do comprehension based instruction actually do so, because most fail to fully engage the gears of the unconscious minds of their students when they teach. They get mud.
They go slowly, they circle, they get plenty of reps, etc. etc. but, because they allow English into their instruction, they do not realize the potential of the method. Not until they fully engage the unconscious mind in slow and interesting circled input without using English will they get results.
As Susan Gross said when talking about reading, the input should be like a movie in their minds, so that the learner’s focus is on the message and not the words, which go into the deeper mind’s language building system entirely unnoticed. The same is true in auditory input (PQA and stories), when the students focus only on the message and not the words being spoken. No mud.
I was standing with Dr. Krashen and Laurie on the beach in Los Angeles at iFLT a few years ago and he he said in a very pointed way to me, directly into my eyes, “What don’t they get about the word ‘unconscious’?” It is the best question to ask. Of course I had no answer. When we mix our CI instruction with English we ruin it.
Perhaps, over the years, Krashen has erred in not stressing the role of the unconscious faculty more. Perhaps he stressed it sufficiently, but thousands of people have chosen to simply ignore it, dismissing the idea as not convenient in their overall pedagogical approach. If Krashen had stressed it more, would it have made a difference? Probably not, as people love to speak English to their kids in their classrooms.
Wikipedia says this about what is called the Acquisition vs. Learning hypothesis:
Acquisition of language is a subconscious process of which the individual is not aware. One is unaware of the process as it is happening and, when the new knowledge is acquired, the acquirer generally does not realize that he or she possesses any new knowledge. According to Krashen, both adults and children can subconsciously acquire language, and either written or oral language can be acquired.[3] This process is similar to the process that children undergo when learning their native language. Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language, during which the acquirer is focused on meaning rather than form.[6]
Acquiring a language is an unconscious process and we usually miss that even after attending many conferences. We forget that part. So our kids can’t really acquire, they only learn.
Learning a language is a conscious process. It is what most kids experience in their classes at school. They learn about the language, coming nowhere near acquisition. The form of language is taught in the form of language rules and grammar with error correction done by the conscious mind.
We must strive in our teaching to appeal to the unconscious faculty of the mind at every moment, and to do this completely, and this means no English (unless we are taking a break – the point is no mixing of English and L2).
If our instruction is not 100% directed at the unconscious mind, it is not CI, in my opinion. It is something else. It is weak instruction. We must not mix CI with English, with other “stuff”, with anything, ever. The back and forth between English and L2 during a class that is done in so many “TPRS” classes is a disaster.
That is why I now demand from my classes ten or fifteen minute bursts of the TL on a timer, an iPad with the timer facing me so that I can refer to it through the entire CI burst. I do this because I don’t trust myself to make it all they way through a class period with breaking into English. So I try for ten minutes and if my timer signals me at the end of the ten minutes that I have done it with no English, then I ask for five more minutes and five after that and so on. Without the timer I don’t make it.
To repeat, and yes I’m trying to be obnoxious here, I think that the entire thing about CI is that we cannot mix it with anything, and that people just ignore that part of Krashen’s research, by and large, because it is too inconvenient.
When, in a dream, the deeper mind is doing the fantastic things it does on a completely unconscious level, we do not interrupt what it is doing by suddenly requiring it to make some kind of contact with the conscious mind. What would that do? It would ruin the dream. Poof. It would ruin the movie.
We learn languages unconsciously (has that point been made yet?), and when the conscious mind (worksheets, verb conjugations, little diversions into English, transitions in class in English, etc.) gets involved, it not only ruins the movie, it ruins the actual process of language acquisition that is going on in the deeper mind, so it is best to try as best we can to keep the two separate.
I think that the point above is the missing link in the comprehension based instruction of many teachers who merely claim to be doing Krashen-based instruction, and that is why I keep repeating it.