According to some CI experts, “breakdown” is a concern. Breakdown is when a student answers a question but shows hesitation and the teacher, upon seeing this in the student, says to herself, “we need to practice the sentence more”. But students are there to listen and absorb what they can, not to be taught a certain sentence. It is in their ongoing flow that we learn languages, not in the focusing on any specific parts of the flow. We do ask yes/no questions in NTCI but we don’t continually monitor their responses, preferring rather to let the Din happen as per Krashen. Do we break contextual messages down when learning our first language? Looking for breakdown is like hammering the input in one nail at a time when no nails are needed. In NTCI, it’s just waves and waves of pleasant comprehensible input (easy on the student and the teacher both) and some goes in and some doesn’t and then when the students sleep the process of parsing out some words as “ready to be accepted” (acquired) into the growing language system or not happens. The process is under our unconscious command and so why “practice” it? Why look for things that the kids can’t yet do? Doing that activates conscious thinking and awareness of the possibility of being wrong and the affective filter kicks in and that is not how the research says it happens. In fact, it is exactly the activation of the affective filter that causes the student to lock up, to “breakdown”.
