I was admiring the crisp New England weather last month when visiting Connecticut and Keri Biron told me that the winters could be pretty bone-chilling. So I do appreciate the nice 60 degrees with sun here in Denver today. While I was watering my perennials, staring at the ground, my mind does what it inevitably does whenever I have a moment to reflect – it turned my attention to CI. And I had a thought that I’d like to share that reflects all of the zillions of other thoughts justifying CI that we’ve had here over the past ten years. It is a thought about CI, however, that has never occurred to me: the fact is that language is in fact a spoken thing and that its written representation is in fact no more that that – an expression of it but not what it is – sound. The sound came first. It’s like a drawing of a chipmunk is not the real thing. So when traditional teachers teach grammar, citing the verbiage about writing in ACTFL to justify what they are doing, they are, in a way, trying to find truth in illusion, and thus are really off base, and not a little silly, and I’m going to sprinkle some stupid in there to describe their mentality, since they claim to be professionals in a professional field, but are really in my mind just a bunch of guys with axes in a field in the 14th century claiming to be surgeons. They aren’t. So, if you ever have doubts about trying to teach using non-targeted comprehensible input, just don’t. You’re on the right track, and certainly you’re on the 21st century track. Alors, ayons un peu de courage!
