I was once demonstrating Look and Discuss with a French 3 class because the picture was still up from a previous French 1 class. (I often use the same material for all my classes because I don’t enjoy planning classes and see no need to, which is a testimony to the power of the comprehensible input approach.)
Since I had just been speaking very slowly to that beginning class about the L and D picture in the previous class period, and possibly since an observer had just slinked in to evaluate me just as I was starting to talk about the picture for a second time, I began to speak very slowly to my French 3 class about the picture, to make sure I got class buy-in.
I was totally surprised when that so-called advanced class got totally involved in the very simple (in my mind) French I level speech that I was presenting to them. I thought, these are advanced students, why would they respond in such a positive way to such simple and slow language? I thought that they would bristle at my slow pace.
What had happened? It could have been the presence of the observer (comprehension trained kids always seem to be wanting to show off their talent to people who come into the classroom), but I sensed it was not, because I had never seen those students react in this way whenever we had been observed in the past. Surely, something was going on to explain the strong positive reaction of the class to the discussion.
I believe it was that these advanced students were happy to understand so clearly because of how slow I was speaking. We talk so often about what we are going through in this method, but we rarely talk about what the students are experiencing. Either they understand or they don’t. If they do, the class is a success to them and they like it. If they don’t, it is a scary failure.
My past training as a teacher included the idea that I should always be challenging my students, always pushing them to the next level, and so in upper level classes that took the form of speaking faster than I should. Of course, they did what all students do in situations when they don’t understand – they lie about it and pretend that they do understand, and they start to create distance.
The truth is that at that point, my level 3 students had only a few hundred hours of comprehensible input under their belts in their young careers as students of French. People need thousands of hours to be able to easily understand the language, so why should I have differentiated in speed and vocabulary choice between a level 1 class and a level 3 class? That class was an eye-opener for me about how important it is to speak clearly and slowly to even so-called advanced students, because in fact they are not advanced at all – they are still babies.