I think that it is fairly accurate to say that we haven’t seen any full blown classes in CI taught at the university level, ever. Krashen gets mentioned, of course, but it is always in a way that does not convey the true power of his five hypotheses in bringing fluency, as if he is just another researcher, which he most certainly is not.
But there are two cracks in the walls of the ivory tower that I am aware of because the cracks were put there by two members of our PLC:
1. Congratulations to Mark Knowles, our own PLC member, who like Bob Patrick at the University of Georgia, is bringing comprehensible input in its real form to the ivory towers of academia. Mark is Director of the Anderson Language and Technology Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He has been in the field of Language Resource Centers since 1996 with a Ph.D. from the Illinois French SLATE program (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education). Mark is now working with Sabrina who is now teaching a course in French at CU Boulder to professors and researchers in language acquisition and they are loving it. We hope to get an update on this and all the other things she has been doing from Sabrina soon and maybe get one from Mark as well. (Many of us met Mark at iFLT in San Diego last summer.)
2. Bob Patrick in Atlanta recently shared with me the good news that he has been asked to continue his work teaching about comprehensible input to graduate students in education at the University of Georgia. Currently he is teaching a course entitled LLED 7045 Comprehensible Input and Second Language Acquisition. In 2012 Bob was selected as the Foreign Language Association of Georgia K-12 Teacher of the Year. According to the organization, Dr. Patrick was selected for the state’s highest
foreign language honor for his use of various strategies, techniques, and materials to enhance student’s interest and acquisition in a second language.