The unbridged chasm between TPRS/CI and school settings – despite over 20 years of trying to bridge it – remains wide. This has caused heartache. Teachers have kind of driven themselves crazy trying to make CI work in schools. Careers have failed.
CI works fine, but I have quietly wondered, for at least ten years now, if CI can even work at all in school settings. School settings are just too unjurious to CI, with all their rules and demands and stupid people judging imaginative teachers who merely want to align with the research but can’t because of the way schools operate. Testing is a huge factor. Ignorant administrators is up there too.
What to do? We don’t need vague advice on this topic. It’s too serious an issue. We need a specific plan for teachers who want to make CI work for them in school settings. See the next post for more on this topic.
1 thought on “Half CI/Half Grammar – 2”
My plan: CI for short bursts of time, and then the rest of the time gets filled in with whatever activities kids seem to enjoy that look enough like school that admin walking in for observations would be happy with them. For me, those filler activities are learning songs, counting in French and doing math in French,Simon Says/Jacques a dit, “yoga” in French TPR style, picture dictionary projects for vocab that would normally be in a level one textbook….I’m sure there are others, but those are in heavy rotation. Then there are the CI activities that are golden like Dictee, the best time filler out there. In a 40 min period we are maybe 20 min in French with some slow time at the start of class for a bell ringer (some sort of note taking usually), a few “brain breaks”for songs and TPR games in the middle and maybe some grammar talk at the end. And I do all of it with the understanding that they won’t learn the language in one year with me, so whatever we do, I just want them to feel happy and successful and maybe they will keep up their studies in high school and college and eventually travel and work abroad.