Over the years, there seems to have been a unique theme, or maybe two, that we as a group have kept at the forefront of our collective mind for discussion here on the PLC for that particular year.
For awhile, about fifteen years ago, over a long period, we engaged in public idealogical or philosophical battles with those who opposed CI, but that battle was won years ago because the traditionalists had no case – nothing in the research supported anything they were doing.
With the increased acceptance of CI which we see today (how things have changed!), those battles have largely disappeared but the problem is that they have been replaced unfortunately by a kind of blind acceptance of what anyone who claims to be a CI expert now says about CI.
So now we might be in a dangerous period of listening to people whose claims may not be valid, because they are selling things. That includes me, but I will explain my position on that below.
I liken where we are right now in CI to the shapelessness of a nuclear cloud well after the initial shape of the cloud, upon its initial explosion, has disappeared. (The mushroom cloud period of CI was in my opinion during the period it was called TPRS between 2000 and 2010 or so.)
I have therefore become very suspicious of those who claim expertise in CI these days, because CI has become, unnoticed by most of us, not an academic colloque so much as it has become a marketplace. Greed twists things up.
Where can one then find true things about CI, if everyone is speaking to each other through prisms, painting things about CI in their own colors in order to make a sale?
My belief is that the true application of Krashen and all the other great comprehensible input researchers, whose work took place and ended basically in the second half of the past century, can only occur inside each of us individually. Krashen said as much to me years ago.
In that interest, I will be directing the conversation here this year in the direction and from the position that it is our own inner work with CI that alone can successfully lead us eventually to our forming our own outer best practices classroom-located vision of what teaching comprehensible input means to us individually. Only then can we say that we have plummeted the depths of the research, when we have made it our own.
We must avoid teaching our kids in our classrooms using the concretized versions of CI pedagogy that have sprouted up in recent years and that are available in the current CI internet marketplace. Why? It is because such products do not reflect our own personalities, but instead reflect the personalities of the seller, who, as in the Land of Oz, is really just a small person behind a curtain.
If I am right that there is no single best way to use CI in our classrooms, and that our application of CI in our classroom teaching must be a kind of plastic and malleable kind of teaching that reflects our own individual personalities as well as those of our students, then we can finally state out loud that this is not a one-size-fits-all method.
Many who grasp the message of this post should immediately feel a sense of relief if CI hasn’t been working for them in their classrooms as they expected. In my view they should also take a long hard look at NTCI – non-targeted comprehensible input – and how in my view it is by far the best choice of CI methods.
In my view NTCI (see link below) must necessarily define the new work, the free work, the real work, the true work that the research describes, but the problem persists that most teachers always want to be told what to do.
This fact is a sad reflection of the new truth in education and in our society that students and people in general now want to be told what to do and how to do it without having to think their own thoughts.
Isn’t that why TPRS has become so concretized? The original research has become tied up with wire in the shape of dollar signs and the legs of the TPRS/CI animal have not been free to roam where the animal wants. This is in direct opposition to the research.
We have entered in our society into a period of control from the top, and it is so sad to see the effect that it has had and continues to have on students who, when younger, displayed all of the wonderful curiosity that memorization later destroys in them. It’s a kind of death of the spirit, death of curiosity of the beautiful sound play of what language really is and, more seriously, the death of fun in learning a language.
So in the spirit of free play in the language classroom and in the spirit of community building and just having fun and classroom instruction that has its base in the individual personalities of each of our students, one of the main themes that we will discuss here this year on the PLC is NTCI vs. what is for sale out there right now.
I think that too many teachers, full of enthusiasm upon first hearing about CI and its amazing potential, have gone, filled with hope, to the summer conferences only to come away months later in their classrooms empty handed.
They thought they were buying a Mercedes but ended up buying expensive clunkers, full of too many gadgets and toys and whistles and loud confusing information that drives them within months of the start of their new “conversion” to CI straight back to the textbook, where at least things are organized, if nothing else.
So 2020 has the potential for some of us to finally grow up as teachers and realize that the work that we must do in our classrooms cannot be about reduplicating what we have learned at some conference or some overpriced training in imitation of others who claim expertise. We can only claim expertise in relationship to our own inner teaching personalities and those of our students.
There is no one way to do CI. I have offered and will offer here what I most resonate with in the Invisibles, but that does not mean that they are the best for everyone. We must each find our own vision of what CI is for us. We must walk the CI teaching path by ourselves, or not at all.
CI does not lend itself to robotic imitations of pedagogies that work only for certain self-proclaimed “experts” whose claim is that since it “works so well” for them (not really) it should then work for you as well.
There are no experts. This is not just my message; it has always been that of Blaine Ray, if not his followers. We are the experts and that implies NTCI and Blaine agreed with me on that point in a March of 2015 email when I asked him directly if he targets or not in his own teaching (not the targeted teaching of those who followed him).
Languages cannot be and will never be learned from targeted lists or in the form of some “curriculum”. The research screams that truth out but few in the CI world seem to ever hear it.
So the theme of how to align the research on comprehensible input with our own inner teaching personalities will be one of the themes we will study this year. It’s time for us to stop feeling like failures at CI because we can’t do what some “expert” does.
We will of course not abandon our main focus over recent years of maintaining and cultivating greater and greater levels of mental health in our very important work as language teachers (builders of links of happiness between people) in this broken world.
If you want to go deeper with these thoughts, search “Fred Rogers” on this site. It’s all there.
Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/category/33-reasons-i-prefer-ntci/