This powerful image of how CI instruction really works is from our PLC member Liam O’Neill. As with all comments that are too important to allow to scroll into the past, I am making this into a separate article with its own category. I know there are lots of categories, too many really, but if they work to help us find things like this article, they are worth it:
I rely heavily on educating the students on what is actually going on in their brains.
My favorite explanation [of comprehensible input] involves a simple circle drawn on the board. Just today, in fact, I told a class this:
“When you were learning to talk 14 years ago, each time you heard a word and understood what it meant, it left a dot in this circle. Over and over again you heard and understood the word. Eventually the circle was filled with 1000-2000, whatever, dots and from that point on that word was imprinted in your brain. The 10,000-20,000 English words/phrases/patterns that you know all have circles like this in your living brain, and together they give you language without you ever needing to think about it. They work together because they know what to say, what sounds right when you’re listening to people and what it all means….
“We’re doing the same thing in Chinese. [I start filling in a circle with dots]. I’m going to give you terms this year and let you know exactly what they mean. Each time that happens your brain gets a dot in the circle. I’m like a painter flicking drops of paint to paint that circle in your brain. But if you’re not paying attention and playing to the game, my attempts, these bits of paint, end up outside of the circle. [start putting dots outside of the circle and impersonate wandering eyes, side conversations, zone outs…]
“You won’t learn Chinese then, because you won’t have received enough of the words/drops of paint. Your circles won’t be filled in in your brain. You need many hundreds of these in your high school career to own those words. When you own the words and you come back six years from now, breaking my heart because you haven’t taken Chinese in college, but you still remember how to say a whole lot of things…that is when you own those words.
“It is for this reason that I am justified in making 35% of your grade based on your interpersonal skills. And it is for this reason that over the weekend I made about 75% of your grades alarmingly low. ”
This isn’t going to work for every student, ie, the really tough black hole types, but it’s really worked for the vast majority of mine. (Disclaimer: I’ve had nearly 100% support for the method over three years for a variety of reasons – one significant one being that I don’t have kids who want to hurt my feelings.) And it also really works, I found this year, with parents on back to school night! A number of kids in a class asked me to share with their parents at back to school night the painting-the-circle image. “I was totally glued to you,” was the students’ reasoning.