Here is a passage from the introduction to my new book, which is entitled The Invisibles – Towards a New Curriculum in Language Instruction. I post it here to let the group know that after all these years I have finally decided that a language curriculum should be based on images, and not on words and ideas. The difference in starting points implies a vastly different set of – in my opinion and experience – just plain better outcomes, and largely because of the levels of student engagement generated:
There is an interchange between the pilot/narrator and the Little Prince in Chapter 2 of Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. When he first meets the Little Prince, the pilot says:
Narrator: Mais…qu’est-ce que tu fais là?/What are you doing there?
Narrator: Et il me répéta alors, tout doucement, comme une chose très sérieuse/And he repeated to me, quite softly, as if it were a very serious thing…
Petit Prince: S’il vous plaît…dessine-moi un mouton/Please…draw me a sheep…
The Little Prince asked the pilot to draw him something! That incredible relationship – the stuff of legend in the literary tradition of France – didn’t start out with words. It started out with a child wanting a drawing from an adult.
Children are interested in images, especially ones that they have created. We can therefore greatly enhance the power of comprehensible input in our classrooms when we ask our students to work from drawings of characters that they make up.
When we spin characters into stories, the usually closed gates of student engagement open wide. The students, fully immersed in the zany details and interesting peculiarities of the characters they have created, forget that they are in a class in which they are supposed to be “learning” and they lock only onto the messages being conveyed about the drawing.
Doesn’t that sound good? We all know that the only thing we have to do to be effective at language teaching is to create ways of really engaging our students in the target language. That’s the trick.