The essence of using comprehensible input in the classroom will never be altered. Nothing can change the simple core fact that we are to endeavor to do our best to SIMPLY STAY IN THE TARGET LANGUAGE AND BE UNDERSTOOD in our classrooms and that is all of it.
We must find a way to get more and more away from the use of L1 if we are to realize the promise of this approach. A DPS teacher named Reuben Vyn always gets the highest test scores in the district. He is also the one who uses the TL in his classroom the most, up to 98% of the time with no hyperbole there.
How to do this? We say we need to do it, but we haven’t focused much on the HOW part. That is because this is such a complex and emotional problem for teachers who have bought into the comprehensible input model but whose teaching hasn’t yet caught up with what they know in their minds to be best for the students.
What does it mean, complex and emotional? Well, for one thing, those of us who transitioned from years and years of using L1 in our teaching have what could be called a bad habit. We’ve always done it the other way around, using English to teach another language.
Also, the medium for communication used in the school building and in all the students’ classes is English. English is everywhere. That’s a problem for us. Mix that problem with the problem of snarky kids discussed her in the past week, and that is two serious problems that can keep TPRS/CI from working for us in our classrooms.
There are, of course, a very limited number of little things that we need to communicate with our kids in various moments of class that we just don’t have time to use L2 to communicate. It would take too long. But we stretch those few seconds of explanation into minutes. We can’t do that anymore.
Really, many of us are not emotionally strong enough to stay in the target language. This is my big problem. Also, my classroom routine is not strong enough to create the necessary order to keep me easily in L2. I need to tighten that up and do like Reuben does. He just starts the year in the TL and never leaves it.
I have suggested in the past few years on this blog space a WEEKLY classroom routine that brings wonderful order to the week, and I have recently suggested a new daily routine. Both are intended to help me stay in French better, so there has been progress on that front this year at least. Those links:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/03/12/new-suggested-daily-classroom-routine-2012/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/01/19/suggested-weekly-schedule/