One of our group members teaches Zulu language. I know – that needs a repeat – he teaches Zulu. I didn’t even know it was a language and so you can add my name to the legion of people who don’t know much about Africa.
But we can forgive ourselves and move on and get better at being global citizens who appreciate and respect what has happened and what is happening now in the great cradle of all civilization.
I met Bryan Stone – from Durban, South Africa – many years ago when he attended one of Judy Dubois’ trainings in Agen, France. Bryan is a real language teacher. What does this mean?
It means that he is someone who takes the research seriously and objects when it is provided to language teachers in a watered-down form – the point of recent posts here.
Bryan wants to learn to implement the real research about comprehensible input language instruction fully in his teaching. It is such a worthy goal and can make all the difference in the success or failure of a career!
In a comment he made today (below), Bryan expresses his concern that the current CI movement is not “delivering the goods”. In saying this, he echoes my concern and heart-felt conviction that the entire CI movement has pretty much lost its way.
Here is his comment, which some of you may have already read today but which I reproduce here because of its colossal importance and which will be the subject of intense scrutiny in this internet space for as many years as the Good Lord allows me internet breath:
…I’ve realized through reading your books that I’ve unwittingly come away from pure CI teaching as I have [since I am now teaching] in a very output-based system. Now I’m trying to immerse myself in this new way of thinking and realign with the research and am looking at all the sources I can, but very often I come across adverts for easy readers, sentence structures that you simply add high frequency verbs into, and output based classroom games, all very much what I’m trying to get away from, but all under the blanket term “CI Teaching” It must be especially difficult for teachers starting out….
Here’s a link to Bryan’s website:
https://www.patreon.com/zamani_zulu_learn_isizulu
By the way, if you are wondering about the Mr. Rogers reference in the title of this post, I’ll explain it later. Daniel Tiger is a symbol for the point that Bryan makes in his above comment. I’ll let you figure out the symbolism later as more posts appear under the Daniel Tiger leitmotif here.
(By the way, I just became a patron of Bryan. Because he is teaching over in Vietnam he can’t attend the next Ultimate CI Book 1 training since it is the middle of the night over there, but he has the self-study materials and once he has mastered the StarChart™ I will begin my own study of Zulu with him.)