A teacher asked me what kind of auditory input materials I would recommend for aiding in developing her own command of Spanish. I responded:
Maybe some of Carol Gaab’s upper level books that she sells for reading classes from her “Fluency Matters” website – the ones with the audio track of the book so you can read and listen at the same time. I definitely am opposed to using those books in entire classes, because they divide the classroom community down racial and economic lines, but using them for a CI source individually would be good.
It seems odd, perhaps, to suggest that a teacher who is obviously way above her students in ability to decode the language read and listen to something that simple. But the brain wants simple. It only wants a lot of simple. The learner shouldn’t have to work to understand because that makes the process an “active thinking” one and not one of “unconscious absorption”, which is how we acquire language. We really do have to be out of our minds to learn a language.
Whatever you get, perhaps something on YouTube as well, make it totally comprehensible and effortless for you. I’ve been a student of French for over fifty years and I’m still a long way from any real command of it. And by my calculation I’ve taught somewhere between 34,000 and 35,000 French classes.
Again, listening to overly fast or complex texts is not advised. What you hear should form instant images in your mind with no difficulty or thinking or a feeling that you have to “work” to create the meaning of what you are reading and hearing – that’s the best kind of CI, the only kind really. The effortless kind.*
*I might suggest that the biggest mistake teachers new to CI make in implementing it in their classrooms is to forget how much the kids need that their experience in a language classroom be perfectly effortless. We still think that “school” means “work”, that kids have to “pay attention”. If they aren’t paying attention, it’s 100% on us and why I now use NTCI exclusively, which does not inhibit acquisition by making the iput boring (bc it’s tied to some kind of list that the kids “have to learn”). We must not get our kids THINKING. Our job is to get our kids so FOCUSED ON THE MESSAGE so much that they forget it’s a foreign language. How do we know when that is happening in our classrooms? When we hear in our classroom lighthearted banter and frequent laughter. When there is a fine glimmer of happiness in their eyes, and when there is a smile on their faces** when they clearly are so focused on WHAT HAPPENS NEXT and not on the language being used to convey what happens next. and when they leave our classrooms each day clearly happy that they didn’t have to deal with another bully teacher in at least one class during their long and difficult days as kids in American school buildings.
**The Persian Perfect Master Hafiz says it best: “Trust what lifts the corners of the mouth to be true.”