Words in new context are less easy for the mind to identify than the same words in previous context. This is a point of importance when we consider what to expect from our students in class and when assessing them.
If you use a word from a previous story in a new story, do not expect your students to remember it. It is in new context.
It is via context that the language is acquired. Teachers who target certain vocabulary in stories and then in later stories use words that “were supposed to have been learned” in the earlier stories are missing the point of the research.
Krashen has shown this in the Natural Order of Acquisition hypothesis and still we do not listen. We build lists of words that our classes are supposed to know, because we “taught” them in stories, and then we have the temerity to insult both our students and the research by expecting our students to know those word in future stories.
It doesn’t work that way.
To support that point, below is a cautionary tale from our colleague and PLC member at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India – Dana Miller-Kitch. who posted the italicized text here a few months ago.
This information could not be more important to the teacher who is new to comprehensible input, because whether she chooses to formally target words or not will affect just about everything that she does in the classroom for her entire career:
Ben –
“I had a great conversation with a parent today. A little background information… This is a highly educated woman who is a writer. They arrived at our school last year and her daughter began taking French with me in seventh grade. Her daughter is a reader and is a highly motivated student. At our first set of parent conferences last September, I explained the how I was teaching and showed some examples of how much the children understand after just six weeks of school. She was amazed and very curious about this way of teaching language because it’s so very different to how we were taught and how many school still teach language. By the second round of conferences last year in the spring, she was blown away by her daughter’s progress.
“So today I bumped into her and she was telling me how this way of teaching still fascinates her. This is assessment week in my class so she was going over some of the documents that I have shared on Google Classroom with her daughter to help her review. She was asking her what some words meant in English from the vocabulary list that we keep a running record of and her daughter couldn’t remember a lot of them. So she told her daughter she better start learning these and getting them under her belt.”
Here’s the important part:
“Then she started asking her about the stories in about some of the characters and she was blown away by how much her daughter understood within the context of the story. So the girl knows what the words mean in a context but out of context, in a vocabulary list, she doesn’t know. I find it fascinating how the brain works and how we acquire languages and this way of teaching language, with non-targeted comprehensible input, is such a rich and valuable way for people to acquire the language. She said that she had to go back and apologize to her daughter because she was wrong. And she just loves the way that I teach the language.”
Clearly, I am lobbying here for not targeting words when using comprehensible input as your way of instructing the language.
For more points that disagree with the concept of targeting words from a list and support non-targeted comprehensible input, new teachers are encouraged to read this post, which is a pillar of the position taken in this PLC about CI:
If you use a word from a previous story, do not expect your students to remember it. It is in new context. Don’t expect anything. Let the natural order of acquisition happen. Let the research override your desire to “teach” new words. That isn’t how God set up the language acquisition process, and He’s pretty good at inventing languages, so don’t trust my word, trust His.