You Never Got Me at "How Are You?"

This is a repost, but in my view an important one as we begin the year:

If you are new to all this, before you get too nervous about the changes that you wish to implement next year, I offer one important idea to hold on to – just take an expression and work with it and stay with it and don’t go into any other stuff too fast. What does that mean?

It means that many people who are to new to how comprehensible input works its magic in the classroom pollute the simplicity of the process by thinking in terms of the old model. What is the old model?

The old model is that good teaching is always about moving forward, always presenting new content and new vocabulary, about constantly entertaining the kids with wonderful new tidbits of information that not only expand their knowledge of French but also happen to show how smart we are.

The worst form of this warped version of teaching is in games. Most games don’t work. None of that stuff that involves English works – it may get the teacher and the kids through the class with some kind of illusion that something was learned, but, in terms of actual language gains, nothing was really learned.

None of that eclectic stuff works because, while all that wonderfulness is going on around them, the kids can’t process it. It is too much for them. Their brain wonders what language to try to process, English or the target language, because it is hearing both. Even the simplest sounds in the target language are neurologically overwhelming to non-speakers of the language.

This, of course (can I get a high five from those of us who have been there?), leads to a melting fear on the part of the teacher that the class isn’t working and an immediate bailout to anything that might pass for proper language instruction, which bailout usually takes the form of going back to the book, where everything looks so organized and wonderful but really teaches absolutely nothing, and merely confuses, keeping everything completely out of the part of the brain that actually learns languages.

Such a shame. The teacher up there communicating all that stuff, some of it in the target language, and the kids just sit there and stare. What a nightmare. But let’s agree on what is really happening in those moments of possible teacher meltdown. The kids stare because they don’t understand and because the teacher is just plain going too fast and trying to impart too much stuff, that’s all.

The kids don’t stare because they are stupid or because they don’t want to learn. Their stares are “deer in the headlights” stares, if you will. They don’t know how else to respond. On top of that, they feel stupid. They don’t want to feel like that, so they start to misbehave or tune out or speak English, anything that will get them out of those moments of feeling stupid.

Such wonderful teaching, and only the really super smart processors get any of it. Those four percenters, by the way, are the worst thing for the rest of the kids, because they create the illusion in the mind of the teacher that their lesson actually makes sense to normal people.

This perpetuates a lie. The truth is that most of the class was possibly left in the dark back at the first expression used in the class, sometimes an expression as simple as, “How are you?” Without proper training to make sure that the dynamic in the classroom is participatory and reciprocal, and that the students and the teacher are each doing 50% of the work (https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=4753), nothing real can happen.

Krashen has shown that all sorts of vocabulary can only be retained if it is learned unconsiously. That is when it sticks. The brain hears it in the din of L2, and then in sleep that night picks out from the din what it wants to retain. This goes on day after day when one is immersed in the target culture. This idea is in direct opposition to the idea that languages can be acquired through cognition (the old way).

Again, if language is experienced as a rich largely unconscious flow (except for the target structure that is being worked on), a flow that is both interesting and meaningful to the listener, it sticks, and the little words are parsed out later by the unconscious mind, as described above. Vocabulary banks overfill in this kind of environment, but no conscious work actually has to be done. Lists don’t work. Any conscious “learning” doesn’t work – it never works.

So, before getting all nervous about trying to retain everything you learned this summer, all you have to do is speak to your students in a way that is interesting and meaningful to them, slowly, making sure that you are talking about them and not Marie and Pierre from Chapter 1 of the text as they walk around in Paris, because your students haven’t met Marie and Pierre and could therefore give a rat’s ass about them, except insofar as that rat’s ass is connected to their grade.

So just stop trying to run around the room and teach a bunch of stuff. Just enjoy hanging out with the kids in the target language. Go slowly. Don’t load them up with stuff. Take it light and stay with that one expression until you sense that they totally know it for real, and not for fake, which they are really really good at doing (acting like they know stuff).

On that fake look – like they get it – learn to assume that they don’t. Why? Because they don’t really know it unless they have heard it hundreds of times in meaningful context. If they haven’t heard the expression enough, then you can be sure that acquisition of that expression hasn’t occurred.

Again, your goal is acquisition of that one structure via comprehensible input. Your goal in no way resembles what you used to do, when you would end a class and have only one or two kids leaving the room with anything actually learned, with the rest feeling very weak in terms of their self-confidence.

Congratulations. You are a teacher and, at the end of your classes, your students leave the room feeling more stupid than when they entered. I did it for 24 years so don’t take that as an insult – I am the worst offender. The short way to say this is, “Don’t confuse your kids by going too fast and by trying to teach them too much.” Less is truly more in the CI business.

In a nutshell – like I could ever make a point small enough to fit into a nutshell – we refrain from going to new content until we have really gotten a lot of reps on the thing we were talking about. Don’t ever leave the expressions that they are trying to get, just because the look on their faces may signal you to go on. Milk that expression. Squeeze it with creative questioning/circling (Berty Segal Cook/Blaine Ray) until you know they have it.

So, just do that in a few weeks and it will all go well. The biggest mistake people make when they are new to comprehensible input is undoubtedly going too fast and introducing new stuff too often. Everybody in the room will soon be mystified and want to run back to the book and use English, with a little swipe of the paw or rude comment about how TPRS doesn’t work.