With stories, teaching a language successfully is very difficult, but it reaches any conscious student. Without stories, success is virtually impossible, and reaches only a few bright kids. You have to pick one of these. If you pick the first, you align with 21st century standards. If you pick the second, you align with nothing. You do, however, convey the illusion to lots of kids that they can’t learn a language. Don’t do that anymore.
HOWEVER, we know that these days in schools it is impossible – for all kinds of reasons – to provide students in school buildings with the pure kind of CI that they heard while growing up. So what if we maybe went ahead and did some output, maybe even some grammar? Just to keep our heads screwed on. Is there a CI Police Force out there? Nor will there ever be. But there certainly is a Traditional Police Force, one that has been operative for a long time.
So do some of what you used to do, what you have to do to keep your job or to take pressure off your soft heart that is so caught up in the tilted and wobbling craziness of education in the U.S. these days. We need to adapt to the culture of the schools we are in. We need to take care of ourselves. We need to take some of the pressure to be a CI rock star off of ourselves. It is very easily possible to go home at day’s end energized.
But if you do use methods that focus on output, at least try to mix in some degree of comprehensible input into each class that you teach, as much as you feel comfortable doing. And don’t forget the power of reading! Reading texts that the students have gotten to know first by sound and co-creation is probably at least a million times more powerful in teaching grammar than studying grammar in the form of worksheets, which stupefies kids.
Related:
“Le Chêne et le Roseau” de Jean de la Fontaine
Le Chêne un jour dit au Roseau :
“Vous avez bien sujet d’accuser la Nature ;
Un Roitelet pour vous est un pesant fardeau.
Le moindre vent, qui d’aventure
Fait rider la face de l’eau,
Vous oblige à baisser la tête :
Cependant que mon front, au Caucase pareil,
Non content d’arrêter les rayons du soleil,
Brave l’effort de la tempête.
Tout vous est Aquilon, tout me semble Zéphyr.
Encor si vous naissiez à l’abri du feuillage
Dont je couvre le voisinage,
Vous n’auriez pas tant à souffrir :
Je vous défendrais de l’orage ;
Mais vous naissez le plus souvent
Sur les humides bords des Royaumes du vent.
La nature envers vous me semble bien injuste.
– Votre compassion, lui répondit l’Arbuste,
Part d’un bon naturel ; mais quittez ce souci.
Les vents me sont moins qu’à vous redoutables.
Je plie, et ne romps pas. Vous avez jusqu’ici
Contre leurs coups épouvantables
Résisté sans courber le dos ;
Mais attendons la fin. “Comme il disait ces mots,
Du bout de l’horizon accourt avec furie
Le plus terrible des enfants
Que le Nord eût portés jusque-là dans ses flancs.
L’Arbre tient bon ; le Roseau plie.
Le vent redouble ses efforts,
Et fait si bien qu’il déracine
Celui de qui la tête au Ciel était voisine
Et dont les pieds touchaient à l’Empire des Morts.
The Oak and the Reed
The Oak spoke one day to the Reed
“You have good reason to accuse Nature;
A Wren for you is a real load;
The smallest wind which by chance
Ripples the water surface
Forces you to bend your head.
While my forehead, similar to the Causasus mountains
Not content to block the sun’s rays
Braves the efforts of the tempest.
What for you is a North Wind is for me but a zephyr.
If at least you grew within my shade
Which covers the whole neighbourhood
You wouldn’t have to suffer as much
For I would protect you from the storm.
Instead you usually grow
On the humid banks of the realms of the wind.
Nature to thee has been unkind.”
“Your compassion”, replied the Reed
“Shows a noble character indeed;
But do not worry: the winds for me
Are much less dangerous than for thee;
I bend, but do not break. You have until now
Against their terrible strikes
Resisted without bowing your head.
But let’s just wait till the end. As he said these words,
From far in the horizons, came running
The worst child the North ever gave birth to.
The tree held strong; the reed bent.
The wind redoubled his efforts
So that finally it uprooted
The oak whose head was reaching heavens
And roots were touching the realms of the dead.