In my opinion, there are two reasons kids don’t engage in our comprehensible input class:
1. We don’t engage them. We get going too fast, we get nervous about the method, we just haven’t got the experience we need with it yet, we don’t really understand what comprehensible input means and so we’re going about it all wrong, etc. Things like that. Usually, with this form of engagement, the entire class doesn’t get it. When that happens, it’s our fault that our classes don’t work.
2. We engage them, but some of the kids in the class rebel against our instruction. They sense something they don’t like. They just aren’t ready to do the hard back and forth giving (they are teenagers) that is required for comprehensible input to work. They have never been called upon to do this kind of thing, and they just don’t know how to do it so they put up a mask of not understanding what we are doing.
In this second kind of lack of engagement, while some kids can be seen to be thriving in the exchange of language, some members of the class, or only one, don’t get what is going on – they are disengaged for whatever reasons. This causes subtle energy shifts in the class that only teachers know.
We suffer as teachers when negative mental mass creeps into our classroom. One kid is enough to disrupt the CI. We often thinks it is due to our own shortcomings. This is a serious error on our part. We cannot save the planet. Kids have not been trained in the art of conversation as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/14/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/
In a word, what we ask our kids to do in our classrooms with the Classroom Rules and jGR requires them to be more human than they want to be, to simply listen and give social back and forth required for any language class to work.
