I have to just relax and take a deep breath and just realize that this is all evolving at its own rate. It is the nature of the mind to want to codify and create all these CI tornadoes – we call them strategies – that keep emerging from the CI cloud, and we are starting to create endless CI activities, so many ideas that we can’t relax, at least I can’t. I had to write them all down in one place and now I feel better.
But the answer isn’t in the funnel clouds that keep coming from the CI cloud, the CI cloud is the anwer. It doesn’t matter what we teach our kids, what strategies we use, as long as it is in the form of lots of reading and listening for the first few years at least, with as few minutes lost to non-CI stuff as possible.
Next time that little traditional devil dude perches up on your shoulder in class and whispers in your ear that you are doing it wrong (past training, no blame), just tell yourself that as long as you are either speaking to or reading with your students in the TL in ways that are hopefully but not always necessarily interesting to them, then you are fine and the old ways will have no dominion over your thinking in class.
The more CI, the more they learn. Choose any funnel cloud you like, get swept up into it, stay in the language, and get carried all the way to the Land of Oz where fluency waits to grow into gigantic language gains sprinkled with lots of happy minutes in class. To repeat, the more CI they read and hear, the more they acquire, and the form of the activity matters little, except to say that the three steps are the most powerful.
The Net Hypothesis is a fact. It is the CI cloud. We learn languages by hearing vast amounts of comprehensible input in an unconscious setting – i.e. we learn languages by focusing on the message and not its medium of delivery.
Then we go to sleep that night, having heard a lot of input in different ways, then, when we are in sleep, our minds parse in some of the input it heard that day, and it gets composted into the soil of the growing language system garden, and other stuff gets parsed out because the language acquisition device/system doesn’t want it right then, that night. It is all so grand and magnificent that it can’t even be understood. And yet we try to understand it. Who are these people who can’t trust that God made it, designed it and all we have to do is implement it, we don’t have to design it, it’s already designed – which is really cool.