Every few months or so I get wigged out about how Krashen has pretty much shown that the acquisition of a language is an unconcious process but we set much of it up to be a conscious process in class. Even people who claim to be CI teachers do that. But they are not honest with the research.
If the kid is sitting there in class analyzing some aspect of language with the conscious mind, it ain’t Krashen. He allows for a little conscious analysis, sure, especially at upper levels, but not in the foul amounts most of us “CI teachers” manage to pollute our classes with.
When we don’t align with the best research, it just wigs me out that we do that and then the teacher down the hallway smells the fake CI and sees us using half English in class and rightly calls foul on the method, misunderstanding that it is not the method but us misusing it, if I may be allowed that run-on sentence.
At the end of a day of teaching CI I want to be able to answer yes to these two questions:
- Did the kids focus on the meaning and not the words of what I said to them in class?
- Did the kids focus on the meaning and not the words of what they read in class?