People who continue (a la TPRS) to use CI to teach word lists and other old-style curriculums perhaps aren’t thinking deeply enough about it.
One person objected that they don’t have enough class time if they do as I suggest of using 15 or 20 minutes per class to teach the traditional curriculum. I counter w the idea that that much time is even too much bc it’s so boring, and all it is is kids memorizing for tests anyway and so they will forget the material, if indeed they ever learn it via memorization.
The only reason we use those 15 or 20 min. in that way is to make people think that we are ‘serious’ teachers, like them.
There’s also the factor of 10,000 hours needed to master a language and we have only 500 if we use every single minute in the TL in a four year program so what exactly can we accomplish again in the way of checking off lists of verbs, grammar concepts, etc.?
If you use one story to attempt to teach three targets and one story takes about 2 to 3 days to process, then it follows that you can only teach three words or word chunks from a list of hundreds of words every two or three days in terms of in instructional time. I’ve never understood this reasoning.
Thus, one story teaches three “structures” every three days and so in one month (20 days) we could teach 3 7 = 21 structures. Over a ten month year we could teach 210 structures, and realistically maybe 100. That isn’t what admins, who are ignorant of the research, want. They want much more and we can’t provide it w the TPRS targeting plan that continues to this day with very dubious results.
The worst is perhaps in the area the novels where people buy lots of books and spend large amounts of (boring) time in them, trying to process them in class w kids of all different reading abilities, which divides the class, which compromises the key element in making CI work – building community.
My entire focus is on keeping kids together in their classroom community but the novels divide them. In about 2010 I was on the DPS community committee that would laboriously pull words from the novels each June to be used in stories the next year. Even new teachers to the district were required to teach those lists.
Such list-making for just one novel would give us like 60 or 80 new words which, just for that novel, would require more than a year’s worth of instructional minutes to be able to read. And some DPS teachers back then wanted to read 4 or 5 novels per year AND do a bunch of stories and all the other TPRS stuff. It was like trying to stuff ten years of instructional minutes using CI into one year.
I never could make that work for me, not even close, so I always felt that I was “behind” and yet what I was doing was exactly what the research says I should have been doing – providing interesting and sometimes compelling comprehensible input to my kids in a natural way.
My goal is to continually challenge the use of CI to teach word lists. I think that teachers who still try to make that a possibility in their CI classrooms should think in terms of available minutes, and then re-evaluate what they are doing in their classrooms.