Most language teachers, or teachers in general, in the past, went through their weeks thinking, “Hmm. I wonder what I will teach today.” And then the book told them. Now the new computer programs are doing that, along with the teachers’ neatly and loboriously planned pacing guides. How wonderful.
Nobody ever really thought of teaching the actual (spoken and read) language. That is because the teachers thought that the medium of delivery of the language was their focus. But Krashen has shown that when you focus on the medium of delivery of a language, the books/computers focusing on the way the language is built, people can’t learn it. That’s a drag.
Now, with stories, it is the core structures that we focus on. When we do that, all the other stuff around them is learned as well. When we plan a week around three structures (see the series here on “rebar” for more on that topic), we don’t wonder what we are going to teach that day and we certainly know that we won’t be focusing on a mere delivery device, which may make our job easier but, as stated, simply doesn’t work.
So often, I have heard people ask Diana Noonan a question about comprehensible input, and she most often fires back the same quick question every time: “What are your structures?” That is very revealing. Diana doesn’t ask what concept the teacher is trying to get across (“Oh, are you working on relative pronouns this month?”). She asks the real question.
We now have the delivery device – comprehensible input – which will supplant the others delivery devices, including computers, which man will defeat, probably quite soon, unless they are in his service and not, as they seem to be now, in the service of the dark forces that want to use them to control us all.
Yes, I’m glad you asked, actually. I do believe that the Tolkein trilogy is the perfect metaphor for the days we are in right now. I also believe that the work of delivering the ring to Mordor is on schedule and that there is absolutely nothing to fear if we just keep the faith and keep going to work every day.
So, back to the point, since I am being observed Wednesday this week, today and tomorrow I sure am going to focus on:
brings back
hides
and getting as many repetitions as I can before being observed. In that way, my students will know and be able to use some real language in the observation, instead of telling me what a relative pronoun is, which, in my school, trust me on this, would get no more interest from a student than the color of the car wash next to our building. The car wash would get more attention, in fact, and that during, to us, a thrilling grammar class on relative pronouns.
Not that there’s anything wrong with relative pronouns. They remain one of my best friends in the sense that I was able to use their complexity as a tool to make myself look pretty smart as a teacher back in the day. Maybe the whole thing about letting four percenters teach language classes goes back to a desire on the part of the four percenter to be intellectually superior to others.
And when we have a bunch of super intellects who happen to be sixteen years old sitting in front of us in an AP track language course, we get to be smarter than they are! Those kids may have been smarter than we were in high school, but we stayed in there and now they’re not!
If we never worked through that kind of pathetic stuff in high school, well, we can do it now! The only problem is, teaching a language using an archaic pedagogy describes a career that is built on quicksand. It must, as many fourpercenters’ careers will soon prove and have already proven, collapse under the weight of the new knowledge we have. Bummer for them.