This 2012 article from Mark Knowles’ bio fits a current thread:
I am now the Director of the Anderson Language and Technology Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I started TA’ing in 1982 and went on to teaching in 1990, and I’ve been in the field of Language Resource Centers since 1996. I have a Ph.D. from the Illinois French SLATE program (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education).
I’m a case study type of person, and a person who likes to ask questions, so I’d like to turn quickly to a recent experience I had. This fall, I attended a Modeling Session of Best Practices at a national conference on language teaching. To give you a little more context, this conference is specifically designed to help young teachers in less commonly taught critical languages, and, rightly so, the efforts of the organizing conference are to bring teachers up from within their own ranks, rather than from the Chosen Expertise. It was the fourth time I have attended this particular conference, and just for the sake of contextualizing things at the rational-ideological level, at an earlier version of the conference, Steven Krashen was one of its keynote speakers.
The session I attended had “comprehensible input” in the title, and that drew my interest immediately. I arrived early, and that was the only qualification I needed for becoming one of the students in the modeling session. I was not asked if I had ever learned the language of instruction, which as it turned out, was a language that I had chosen for experimenting with Rosetta Stone for the first time this summer. Before I describe how the modeling lesson went, let me frame this by saying outright that the teacher was much stronger than I could ever have hoped to be even on my best days of teaching. Everything had been conceived in terms of backward design, the goals were designed clearly from the outset, and “communicative” comprehension checks were included in the plan. The teacher also was likable, professional, and fit. And no matter how likable, professional, and fit one is, offering oneself as the object of scrutiny from fellow teachers is the very essence of Courage and Martyrdom.
Now, the lesson. The way I knew that the goals were drawn up using backward design was because they were written in English at the board. The lesson itself, however, was completely in the L2. The teacher began the lesson with complete sentences, or, rather, full paragraphs, at what felt like a realistic, native-like rate. This certainly established his authority of the subject. He used some body language throughout those paragraphs to suggest that he was scaffolding meaning onto the paragraphs, accompanied by little nods of the head as if to say, “Yes, indeed, that body language you observed was an intentional pedagogical tool to aid beginners in comprehension, but it was not what native speakers really do in the L2.” At one moment he pointed to the goals of the lesson on the board as he was speaking, so I surmised that if I read those goals, I’d have the subtitled version of what he was telling the class.
One of the goals was to learn what TPRS folks would call six structures. Another one was to learn the written version for those structures. The instructor had designed two conventional if not clever exercises we were to do with a partner in order to process the structures meaningfully. Now, I can say with 100% assurance that I understood what the six structures were (that was fairly simple). But when the teacher explained what we were to do with the structures in the exercise, I was quite lost. Other students, on the other hand, including those at my table, did not appear to be as lost as I was. I was beginning to become suspicious that a greater amount of filtering for past languages studied should have occurred before the lesson began.
While it crept up gradually, at a certain point, what was happening to my inner psychological state was not very pleasant. I came in quite sympathetic to the task at hand, and while I wanted to protect and encourage a fine young teacher of language in a very difficult situation, something caused me to become frustrated, humiliated, and, finally, outraged. I began to contemplate my exit strategy, and realized quickly that that would create a scandal, and I did not fly across the country to this conference in order to do that. As I realized that I was stuck, I said to myself, “go with it,” meaning that I had resolved to become that bad ass student we all know we have and fear. When it was my turn to do an activity in our small group, I resisted, and relayed that message with shrugged shoulders. My neighbor and team partner, frustrated with my ignorance, let out an audible sigh and stiffly wrote in my answer for me on the worksheet. That sort of thing happened twice in a very short span of time.
When the model lesson was over, I actually suspected the teacher knew something was not going right, and bravely girded himself for the post-session critique. While I was prepared to state exactly how I felt as politely as I could muster, the teacher called on another student to my left to tell the group how she felt about the lesson. Through tears, that student spoke about how terrified she was to be in the place of a student who did not understand the lesson. I was not alone, amazingly enough. I was not the only one in our group who had spent a number of years learning languages, learning grammar and pragmatic competence, learning how to be thrown into the deep end of linguistic ambiguity, only to feel completely unhappy in a very similar and alienating predicament.
It was a painful but important learning experience for me. I hope the teacher, who admitted to trying to accomplish a lot more than he normally would, also learned a lesson. Perhaps he assumed that language teachers would pick up the language concepts much faster than his students do. But that assumption may have also betrayed something Ben Slavic refers to often, which is that our students internalize much less language input than we suspect they do.
Counting my grad school language teaching experience, I have been involved with the profession for more than 30 years. I was inspired early on to keep communication at the center of my teaching. This was reinforced in the environment of the University of Illinois where I fed off such important teachers as James Lee, Bill Van Patten, Diana Musumeci, and Sandra Savignon. But it was not until I started to become acquainted with Ben Slavic’s work at the iFLT in Breckenridge this summer that I began to re-evaluate the concept of Comprehensible Input. It seems to me that the term itself does not capture exactly what we seek in our classrooms. That is because we must ask ourselves, comprehensible to whom, and how often? Would it be too late to rename what we really seek, “Comprehended Input,” knowing at the same time that we will always be beset by a margin of doubt about whether something is fully comprehended? Otherwise, meaning is not negotiable, and I believe meaning, by definition, is always negotiable.
Nonetheless, should we put out comprehensible language for the few, for the fast processors, and leave behind the many? Who would be happy with that concept of comprehensible input? I have the sense that TPRS under the skillful interpretation that a new generation of teachers brings to it is based as much on an ethical stand as it is on a learning theory. I join this community of practice as a humble student who wants to learn everything there is to learn about that stand, and curious to know if we can thereby deepen the definition of what is becoming a time-honored concept in SLA.