There is a lot of negative energy pulling us back to the textbook, but it will be short-lived. Don’t get fooled. The language teachers of the future will teach from their hearts and not their minds, since it is pretty clear right now that the old ways of teaching languages are in their death throes. […]
One of our group members teaches Zulu language. I know – that needs a repeat – he teaches Zulu. I didn’t even know it was a language and so you can add my name to the legion of people who don’t know much about Africa. But we can forgive ourselves and move on and get
It’s the lists that caused much of the confusion out there today about CI instruction. The traditional teachers couldn’t believe that lists weren’t needed to acquire a language. They couldn’t handle the radical thought that just CI is all that is needed for people to learn a language. Why? It’s because comprehensible input is the
Testing is a structure/form that absolutely strangles comprehensible input, whose benefits are hard to measure and different in terms of speed of acquisition for each individual student, since everyone processes new language at different speeds. But the fact that each CI student learns at different speeds didn’t stop the traditional movement from testing CI students
The problem in CI has always been that big gap, alluded to in the previous post, between what Blaine and Susie and Jason and the other super stars of the movement could do and what novice CI teachers could do. There was such a big disconnect between what the original reformers and innovators who had
We could sum up the first two articles in this series of posts on form and function in CI language instruction by saying that we have needed a CI curriculum that offers some kind of “form” within which to keep us “safe” as we speak to our students in the TL. We haven’t had that. We
A lot of us in the language teaching profession might agree that, even in CI/TPRS circles, the lack of balance between form and function in our profession is a core factor in explaining our unceasing failures to really reach kids with good communicative activities. Why do teachers trying to teach using comprehensible input fail so
This design maxim came out of the 19th century in architecture. I love it. Here is an example from Wikipedia about its meaning: “If the design of an automobile conforms to its function—for instance the desire to sit six people in two rows—then its form is said to follow its function.” How does this apply
Hello Ben and Patreon group. I have been doing CI since 7-8 months. I joined this group because I really like your Star Sequence, I see great opportunities in it. I teach adults online mostly on level A1-A2-B1 in Budapest, Hungary. Because of COVID I no longer work in language schools, but I started my
Those working in the Ultimate CI books are reminded that you can start a class with not just the student cards but also one word images and individually created images, even though they are not described until Book 2. It depends on where you are with CI. If you are just beginning, use the student
Q. What do I do with my fast processors who are always trying to get me to speed up? A. Don’t acquiesce to their demands. Tell them that you will not speed up to the level they want in your instruction until all the kids in the classroom understand. Tell them that you are doing
In my view, the vocabulary lists required by schools and school districts do much to ruin the possibilities that might otherwise be found in comprehensible input language instruction. Such lists throw mud on the kids parading down the street in their shiny new language learner outfits. I have made the point many times elsewhere and
