Many CI teachers don’t/can’t apply what Krashen has shown to be true that language acquisition is an unconscious process. The teaching gene in them is too dominant. They think they have to teach. But they don’t. All they have to do is communicate, which is far different than teaching.
Here is my point again:
…many CI teachers don’t/can’t apply what Krashen has shown to be true that language acquisition is an unconscious process….
Well, what DO they do? They do the fluff. These are activities where the minds of the children are constantly being pulled back and forth, sometimes within seconds of each other, between their conscious and unconscious minds.
Egregiously, the kids experience a quick bit of confusing L2, then some kind of useless explanation of it in L1. It’s kind of cruel on a mental level, if you think about it. They can’t get a groove on.
It is those sustained periods in the TL that are the key to everything, the source of the biggest gains, the aspect of our teaching that aligns most with the research. I would guess that (a) those sustained periods in the TL or (b) silently reading at their own pace are responsible for 98% of the language gains we get in our classes.
I say again that the other stuff is just fluff, going back and forth between the languages, sabotaging the students’ minds from doing what they are designed to effortlessly do. We might as well pour sugar into the gas tank of a car.
So much time being wasted doing “activities”, playing “games”. Why is the time doing those things wasted? Again, because (a) and (b) above happen in the unconscious mind, where Krashen has shown language acquisition occurs, and the fluff happens in the conscious mind, where language acquisition does not occur.