Is comprehensible input a strong enough force to bring change to school cultures? I’m not asking if it is an effective force in general. Indeed, it is THE driving principle of language acquisition. Rather, I am asking if it can be effective in school language classrooms.
Where am I going with this? As always, I’m not sure. But there is a thought somewhere in here that has always bothered me. For every solid bit of evidence coming out of classrooms like yours, Chris, I wonder about all the teachers around – the Helena Curtains and Mimi Met-led crowds connected to big business – that vast majority of teachers that goes around misinterpreting CI, turning the name of Krashen and the term comprehensible input into a kind of catch phrase.
That has already happened with the term TPRS, which is a name that has become political, whose origin was taken from Asher and then made into something completely different from Asher (which, I am told, pissed Asher off), and which name now means next to nothing as tens of thousands of teachers claim to “do TPRS” in much the same way that a child would insist that he plays professional soccer for Real Madrid but in fact plays on a 10 year old pee wee team in Dallas named Real Madrid.