Bob sent me an email this morning extending his thinking on understandable messages. It all relates to a previous article (Bob Patrick on CI – 1), which I republished this morning here to give us some background information for what is contained below. If you haven’t yet read that article I would suggest you read it before continuing on in this article.
The reason these articles are important to me is that they touch on the danger of trying to control everything that goes on in our classrooms. That is to say, if comprehensible input follows a natural process that we cannot be in control of, then why are we always trying to control it?
I am concerned that we don’t really get comprehensible input, how easy it is. We want to make a simple thing complicated. I suggest that we consider just letting go and teaching our classes and trusting that if we speak the L2 to our students in a way that is natural and meaningful and interesting to them, then they will learn.
So please find below a selection from the email Bob sent me this morning to kind of explain things and then, below it in italics, the actual article he wrote. Bob expresses ideas in the italicized text below that are highly appropriate to the times we are in, to the subtle internal work some of us are doing now as teachers, to the deep change, and to ideas recently expressed here by PLC members like jen and Jeffery and others about the convulsive nature of this change.
I would even state that I consider the content below to be brand new even in comprehensible input circles, and certainly stuff that is brand new in foreign language pedagogy. Thank you Bob for writing this and also congratulations on being one of the five finalists for ACTFL teacher of the year last week.
So here is what Bob sent in that email to set up the article in italics below it:
“I’ve been slowly, VERY slowly, reading Robert Sardello’s book Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness. It’s one of those books on spirituality, psychology, mysticism, and mystery that most folks would yawn at or run away from, but he’s speaking deeply to my soul. What I keep finding is that what he has to say about entering into the Mystery of Silence is almost always and completely applicable to this quantum leap you are talking about – that language acquisition is totally unconscious, that efforts to understand it (read “control it’) are futile.
“So, yesterday I took a particularly poignant passage from the last chapter of his book and slightly paraphrased it for ‘delivering understandable messages in L2’. Have a gander.”
Delivering understandable messages in L2 is a creative act, and when we are within that activity our experience is much the same as when we are doing any other creative act, such as painting or playing music.
The creative act of delivering understandable messages in L2 uses words as the creative medium through which the meanings of words are found. The words are like brush strokes, and we can similarly know, while delivering understandable messages in L2, when we have made a wrong stroke. We often find ourselves going back and saying the word we have just said in order to find the right field of resonance (especially if we are teaching to the eyes). We may not know in advance where we are going in L2, but it is very clear when we have lost the way.
In the use of repetition while delivering understandable messages in L2 we are progressively dissolving our usual, analytic mode of consciousness. We are working against all that is within us (and some of our students!) that wants to have explanations, wants to know what is going on, and wants to be in control. In fact, we bring the problem or a difficulty of learning to communicate meaningfully in a second language and put it into a medium where it will dissolve. Many of the difficulties that we think we face in L2 teaching have to do with the way we approach our different life circumstances. Our approach is probably analytical, and we have come up against something (in language teaching) that defies an analytic attitude so we don’t know what to do. Under these circumstances it is salutary to enter into the act of delivering understandable messages in L2 full of repetitions of the problematic words or structures and allow that desire to control, to analyze, to explain to dissolve in the experience.
Teaching in this way is an act of sacrifice. We have to relinquish for a time our usual capacities and capabilities to undergo a kind of transubstantiation of our being. We relinquish our usual powers of sensing and knowing and acting. This element of sacrifice is crucial, for otherwise we are engaging in an act that is ultimately self-centered (think of how we have taught grammar-translation). The process of delivering understandable messages in L2 initially moves us out of our self-centeredness, and it is only as we become more accustomed to teaching language in this way that our self-centeredness re-enters. We slip back into spectator-consciousness and find ourselves wanting to get something for ourselves out of teaching. Becoming aware of the element of sacrifice in our teaching helps keep us from falling back into an egotistic sense of teaching. In delivering understandable messages in L2 we offer our usual capacities as a gift to the students in front of us, not reluctantly, but filled with the warmth of love.