I got this today. It’s long, but it shines light where light is needed:
Dear Ben,
I have a long rant, but I just spent three hours last night, and am scheduled for seven more tomorrow, of a workshop that seems to ignore everything we know about CI, and yet even quotes Krashen.
I like the little activities, but can’t believe that people still think that kids will learn if they are immersed in a sea of I.I. (Incomprehensible Input) while they are moving around a room.
The leader spoke to our group in French. I’m no dummy. I could tell she was calling someone up and having us count the buttons on her clothes. Then we counted the buttons on two other people’s clothing. Then we counted our own. Then we lined up in order of button number. Then we told the people around us our number (except I didn’t, being still unable to pronounce the number 1 in French). Then we sat down.
Ten minutes when I knew what to do, but got nothing out of it. In those same ten minutes in a TPRS classroom, I would have at the very least understood three phrases.
[ed. note: they are teaching numbers and not students, for one thing. Also, this is exactly what Miriam Met did in a day long workshop out here once. She went around a room of over two hundred people and talked about their shoes. Apparently, she thought that if she just said a whole bunch of sentences with the word shoes in them, that we would understand the rest of it. But we didn’t. All we heard was shoes, which she was pointing to. It was, as you say, Incomprehensible Input.]
My daughters, laughing at my ranting and my ire, said that I could have the kids line up in order of siblings and then answer questions about the siblings… better assignment, but still not interesting and still not a correct flood of CI. What are we doing in this country?
[ed. note: I think that they think that, by talking about their own buttons and their own siblings, the class is somehow personalized and more interesting. Oh boy, they must not have been around too many American classrooms in the past few years…]
I think that Cooperative Learning (CL) is a much better way of having kids work together in groups where they are working on content together in classes where they already know the language and are putting together information, but having kids talk in groups in languages they don’t know and thus messing with others’ CI is a waste of time. CL begs Krashen’s point.
The speaker said that having kids negotiate meaning was what Krashen suggests we do. I don’t believe that he would approve.
[ed. note: maybe he’ll comment. In my view, negotiation meaning implies that there is something worthwhile, interesting and meaningful to negotiate. Buttons, siblings… what are we negotiating here?]
I know that I used to do stuff like that, so I can’t totally blame them, but these teachers were all so positive about how now kids wouldn’t be afraid to say the numbers and they’d rehearse them with their partners.
[ed. note: what, exactly, is so great about being able to say the numbers? Our students would look pretty stupid in downtown Dakar counting to ten in French. Where’s the beef?]
There’s no meaning here! …. the idea that it’s better to let kids do the talking still gets to me. No. The best talking is done by the person who knows the most TL and who can personalize it for the class and go slowly enough for everyone to understand. Given that flood of French, I turned right off and probably learned less than a kid would have.
[ed. note: now I know those presenters were Met fans – we got flooded in shoes and incomprehensible Spanish. I don’t understand why they think that they are teaching anything. Maybe they are so busy looking at shoes and buttons that they don’t bother to look into the bored, confused eyes of their charges.]
I’m so glad you let me rant. I am so mad that I have to go back for seven hours tomorrow – leaving my students in the charge of a non TL-speaking sub…merde!
Oh! Do you know these important statistics, which are courtesy of the CL booklet? The document is called “Stages of Second Language Oral Acquisition”. The headings are: Stage/time/definition/appropriate activities/receptive vocabulary.
pre-production: up to one year/silent period, emphasis is on listening/listen, point move, choose, imitate, act out, draw/500 words
early production/3 months-1 year/limited comprehension, one-two word responses, patterned language and chunks/name, list, categorize, label, respond with one or two words/1,000 words
speech emergence/1-3 years/good comprehension, errors in pronunciation and grammar, simple sentences with limited vocabulary, mainly in present tense/describe, define, explain, recall, retell, summarize, role-play, compare, contrast/7,000 words
Intermediate fluency/3-4 years/excellent comprehension, few grammar errors, variety of sentence structures and tenses/give opinions, defend, debate, justify, examine, analyze, create, evaluate, read, write/12,000 words
Fluency/5-7 years.
Some of us at my table were joking that these periods were for in-country experience from birth.
It’s hard to know whom they’re describing.