Our students do not learn from lists of words grouped in semantic sets or thematic units. Such lists represent a pox on our attempts to teach using comprehensible input. They waste time and people who use them fit into a category that Brigitte Kahn once described in a comment as teachers who “claim to do CI/TPRS but for the most part they just think they do because they ‘tell stories’ in their classrooms”.
The fact is that those teachers are all about memorization of word lists and they don’t tell stories at all. The “comprehensible input” that they offer their students is neither comprehensible in the real way nor does it lead to strong readings and therefore their comprehensible input is essentially worthless. But these are the teachers who currently dominate our profession, and who make decisions affecting millions of kids each day.
Many of us who use CI do use walls of words and/or verbs we put up in our classrooms. But these are not lists that in any way resemble the lists of words given to kids to keep them subservient and in memorization mode, to keep them stuck in the conscious analytical part of their brains where language learning cannot happen. The purpose of the word walls is to teach CI students how to interact in the target language in the simplest way possible with the teacher and with joy.
Much of what we do is like that. The strategies we use are camouflage strategies meant to foster interplay in the language between us and our students; the words we use go unnoticed in the interplay between everyone in the target language and, since language learning is unconscious, the language is acquired in the way. THAT is the part that those who ask kids to memorize lists don’t get.
But can this happen in schools? Do school cultures support interpersonal communication enough? Can we build cultures of trust and interplay and reciprocal back and forth play in our classrooms when the culture in the building is not that way at all? Can we build webs of connectivity and of positive class chemistry in our classrooms?
Indeed, the business of most schools is not and has never been about learning in a joyful and reciprocal and participatory way, but rather about keeping kids on task, on a curriculum. The business of schools is about holding teachers accountable for a curriculum at the expense of the requisite human piece when it comes to learning languages.
The question must be asked again – can a teacher who is being held to a curriculum even do comprehensible input in a school setting?