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Definition of CI
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18 thoughts on “Definition of CI”
Ahem . . . I opened my workshop at FLAG last week with a discussion of what CI is–which I took from Ille Magister Ipse Krashen. 🙂 And, as I said: we can never hear this too much. Simple? Yeah, and we think it has to be more.
“Note that the actual relationship between the amount of CI obtained and individual progress depends on whether the CI contains aspects of the target language that the acquirer has not yet acquired, but is developmentally ready to acquire.
CI=I+1
“The +1 refers to the developmentally ready part of this statement.”
I wonder how we know what the student is “developmentally ready to acquire”?
Practically speaking, how do we know what the “I+1” is for the student?
Skip, my own working approach is that I have a general idea, and I work with it. At the same time, I watch the eyes in the room, and I can actually see who is ready for this particular thing right now and who is not. Really, CI is the best Differentiated Instruction there is. If we are offering CI to our general sense of the room, and watching the eyes, we will know how to modulate, almost moment by moment.
What Bob said.
In addition, every student is different, so we have to cast a wide net to be inclusive for every student.
Here is a sudden thought, perhaps others could comment:
If my experience is not anomalous, then we can teach so that all students understand the input. However, only those who are ready for acquisition will acquire what they hear or read. The others will have to have it repeated at a later time, when they are ready for acquisition. In addition, those who have acquired “passively” still need repetitions for it to become “active” in their communication.
To me, it is particularly this notion that each student acquires when and only when he or she is developmentally ready, and each one develops at a different rate, that justifies pop-up grammar as well as the net. In the traditional grammar curriculum, a grammatical concept is presented at a particular point in the curriculum irrespective of whether or not students are ready for it. How many times have we heard the lament (or even lamented ourselves in a previous lifetime), “I spent three days on the direct/indirect object pronouns*, and they still don’t get it”? Well duh. they weren’t developmentally ready for it. Yet, having spent three class days on this, we are frustrated that “learning” has not occurred. On the other hand, if I spend three seconds explaining that “Ich gab es him” means “I gave it to him”, then I don’t remind repeating that 43+ times so that each student in the class hears it when developmentally ready. (I can even take the time to be sure students understand who or what “es” and “ihm” refer to.) After all 43 x 3sec = just over two minutes, and that’s a whole lot less time than the two-and-a-half hours under the old system.
*Insert grammar point of your choice.
Once again blindsided by autocorrect: “Ich gab es ihm“.
Robert, sine dubio, certe, sane, apert! Nothing has given me more relief and joy as a teacher than sinking into the understanding that they will acquire something when they are ready. So, we keep showing up and offering these circles within circles of understandable language–and take delight in watching when the fire catches in each set of eyes.
“Nothing has given me more relief and joy as a teacher than sinking into the understanding that they will acquire something when they are ready.”
I second that thought entirely. That is what make s the difference between teaching in a traditional way i.e teaching language in a predetermined sequence, and what we do as CI teachers which is teaching in a spiral curriculum . Let me expand a bit.
Traditional ways of teaching approach curriculum in a sequence, assuming that the time has come for students to learn such and such . So for example most French teachers first year will focus on teaching discrete grammar items such as present tense of ER and IR verbs as well as thematic vocab units. Second year we’ll teach past tense and third year future , etc…. All that because someone has arbitrarily decided that this is what they are ready to learn in that sequence, and which is totally absurd and does not align with research and Krashen s Natural Order of Acquisition .
In a spiral curriculum we look at their readiness to acquire, their I +1 if you will. We assume children are not all ready to acquire at the same speed. Readiness to learn is at the core of what we do in that spiral curriculum, and that is because we inform our practice on SLA research.
So instead of exposing our kids for a certain amount of time to a narrow topic (grammar and vocab of the day, lesson,unit) we try to expose our kids to a wider variety of themes and structures over and over again, hence the primordial idea of recycling which is so important in what we do. We also use the metaphor of casting the net, the i+1
And this also addresses differentiation in a big way.
Thank you Bob for your thought which made me articulate mine.
One more thought:
This is what I love about this method :
We have to be cognizant to the fact that we JUST DON’T KNOW when kids are ready to acquire (for the reasons mentioned in my previous post answer to Bob). So ANYONE , regardless of their prior knowledge of the language can theoretically walk into our classrooms and acquire the language provided they are given tons of CI in multiple contexts SLOWLY And repeatedly.
That is another reason why this method is absolutely divinely magic and can accommodate classes with various levels : b/c we just don’t know when and what kids are ready to acquire. THAT is the magic part , or the divine one ( only God knows…….!)
Robert said, “If my experience is not anomalous, then we can teach so that all students understand the input. However, only those who are ready for acquisition will acquire what they hear or read. The others will have to have it repeated at a later time, when they are ready for acquisition. In addition, those who have acquired “passively” still need repetitions for it to become “active” in their communication.”
I see this very truly in my classes. I am learning to be happy when a student asks me how to say something, or asks what something means even after many times hearing/reading it. I need to begin training the students in the same way.
I tell my students that there are 5 stages to “acquisition” that we can track. (okay so I made them up, but they don’t know that!)
1. They hear the phrase/word. As in they are cognizant of the sounds. They are paying attention and they can repeat the sounds if I asked them to. In the beginning, the brain doesn’t even hear things that don’t bear meaning. It’s why articles and even linking verbs seem to take forever to acquire…they don’t carry much meaning.
2. They recognize the phrase/word. They “feel” like they’ve heard it before…or they can pick out a word they know inside of it, or can line up a cognate in English…
3. They know what it means. They can visualize it, understand it.
4. They can produce it with hesitation. They may have to pause and think, link it to something else they know, try to picture what it looks like in a written form (picturing on a page etc.), sing a line of a song, etc. in order to pull it out of their brains.
5. It’s automatic. It falls out of their mouths and off of their fingertips/pens quite naturally, although maybe not as instantaneously as English seems to.
I tell them that their brains will hang on to a word/phrase in stages 1,2 and 4 for as long as it needs to before it becomes a part of their long-term schema. Our job is to just keep using the words/phrases until it does. Also, things that have “just crossed over” may remain close to the border and go back and forth over the line several times!
with love,
Laurie
I love this explanation for the students — really great for them metacognitively 🙂
Hi Laurie – thanks for this explanation! It bears out my experience even if you “made it up.” It validates students who are not yet producing with the language but can recognize it, or understand it, and shows it’s a continuum.
Takes me back to Ben’s mind meld. Back at NTPRS, when some grumpy teacher asked: how do you know that they have understood what you have said without administering some sort of assessment? or something like that. He just looked at them and said “mind meld.” It is a feeling we get, when the class is on the same page, our ears are on the whole class, and our eyes are on the barometers, and we’ve circled something longer than we think we should have to (because it always needs to be longer than we think is necessary), and then we think of the perfect new word to introduce, not because it is on our list or in the textbook, or is high on some frequency list (though it is probably all of those), but because we WANT to add it, and it will be fun and interesting, and the kids will enjoy it, and it will give a story a new twist, and it doesn’t matter how difficult of a construction it is if it adds to the content of the discussion. And we can hardly contain our excitement, and we let the kids know that a great word is coming up next, and they won’t believe this, and it will blow their minds, and they’re right with us, and with all the drama and fanfare you write it up on the board, savor it, let them eat it up, do a bunch of ooh ahhs, circling, etc, and the whole thing is expanding their knowledge of the language, and you’re all having a blast. It is not always like this, but it can happen, and when you’re in mind meld mode, it is so intuitive that you just know that you are ready for +1, and you blast off.
I think it was Susan Gross who following Krashen said that nobody knows a) what the exact order of acquisition is and b) how to determine what exactly “I” is.
All I can say after 5 weeks of TPRS is that all I seem to have to do is present CI with a tiny bit of grammar (e.g. “Clase- what’s the diff between ‘tenía’ and ‘tenían’? That’s right: s/he had and you guys or they had”) and they evetually get it.
With my beginners, I am now getting stuff like adjectives in the right place and #/gender agreement. They havn’t had anything other than pop-ups…so I am encouraged. I do have a few French refugees who demand the verb charts. Fine, knock yourselves out, kids, grammarz iz fun too, here’z the sheetz.
I keep likening this to raising your own kids and talking about sex. They WILL ask, and they will ONLY listen for as much as they are ready. I have to pay attention to THEIR signals, and the look in THEIR eyes.
Grammar? When they ask for it, whatever they ask for, for as long as their eyes are taking it in. That’s never very long in my experience. Really only about 30 seconds. Maybe two minutes once in while.
The four percenters will hang around and ask for more or come after school for more. I am happy to accommodate them, too. As I said in an earlier post, two came asking for so much I finally asked if they would like to check out a student grammar book from me. They were delighted. I was happy for them. A week later, one returned the book. She was done with it–and happy. The other asked if she could PLEASE keep it until the end of the year. Of course. And so it goes.
We gave the National Latin Exam this past week. Largely the report was: that wasn’t really bad at all. Next?
We must keep skip’s comment/question at the forefront here:
…I wonder how we know what the student is “developmentally ready to acquire”? Practically speaking, how do we know what the “I+1? is for the student?….
Joseph Dzeidzic, Paul Kirschling, Diana Noonan and I were out for beers last month. This came up. We argued. It was one of those i + 1 arguments where you never quite know what you really mean. What really is the + 1? I’ll be sure to ask Krashen that this summer.
There is the definition where people just say that the + 1 is the motivation factor. But is that idea of motivation (to want to know what the other words mean on top of the words you already know) connected to Krashen’s term “developmentally ready”? I don’t think it is, because many of our students are not motivated. Did Krashen’s research include studies on kids who are forced to be in class?
My point is that there are so many factors, skip, in this i + 1 deal that we could, like the four of us that night, get confused about i + 1. I take pride in being confused about i + 1. I don’t know, just looking at my students, who is ready for what, and all I can do is feel where the class is and slow down some more.
Whatever i + 1 is, it’s got something to do with a student who makes connections on a solely individual basis as Bob Patrick talked about above. And so, as in so much we discover about this method, we again see how intuitive it is.
What is important for me in skip’s question is not the answer to his question, I don’t think there is one. What is important for me is that we remember the question when we teach and keep it mind and forgive ourselves when we know, we just know, that we didn’t reach certain kids in that class that day.
I’m going to repeat that bc it is important for me to keep in mind when I teach my classes:
…we…forgive ourselves when we know, we just know, that we didn’t reach certain kids in that class that day….
Oops. Now my administrator can nail me. I didn’t differentiate properly. I didn’t reach out to that kid he kept looking at in class – the one I ignored. The kid wasn’t developmentally ready bc his dad just got deported and his little sister didn’t come home last night. So I let him go. And it reflected badly on my evaluation.
Now, and this was first said by Angie and repeated above, with this new information, at least to our group – the information contained in this thread – that our perfect four percent selves can the hell LET IT GO if we don’t reach a certain kid. They aren’t fricking DEVELOPMENTALLY READY, whatever that means. OK? So just let it go, Mr. Evaluator Robot with your boxes to check. Let it go. I know my kids better than you do. And they are human beings, not lab rats. You probably don’t even have a box on that page about how much certain kids may be hurtin’ do you?
We won’t know when they are developmentally ready because they are individuals. A class is not a person. The most important thing I read above is this from Sabrina:
…we JUST DON’T KNOW when kids are ready to acquire….
And this from Robert, who explains how pop up grammar and the net are justified and real tools for real gains as opposed to:
…in the traditional grammar curriculum, a grammatical concept is presented at a particular point in the curriculum irrespective of whether or not students are ready for it….
This is, to me, pure dynamite. It means that since we, as four percenters, still have that gene in us as teachers, we have to throw all of our knowledge to the skies and just deliver the CI. That is such a challenge. But the entire concept of flow in language (search that word “flow” here for the articles) is ultimately what can give your mind respite from having to know the answer to that question, skip.
We don’t need to know anything about who’s ready for what. We just have to do exactly what John said here, in what is to me a sweet prose poem about all that is good about what we do:
…it is a feeling we get, when the class is on the same page, our ears are on the whole class, and our eyes are on the barometers, and we’ve circled something longer than we think we should have to (because it always needs to be longer than we think is necessary), and then we think of the perfect new word to introduce, not because it is on our list or in the textbook, or is high on some frequency list (though it is probably all of those), but because we WANT to add it, and it will be fun and interesting, and the kids will enjoy it, and it will give a story a new twist, and it doesn’t matter how difficult of a construction it is if it adds to the content of the discussion. And we can hardly contain our excitement, and we let the kids know that a great word is coming up next, and they won’t believe this, and it will blow their minds, and they’re right with us, and with all the drama and fanfare you write it up on the board, savor it, let them eat it up, do a bunch of ooh ahhs, circling, etc, and the whole thing is expanding their knowledge of the language, and you’re all having a blast. It is not always like this, but it can happen, and when you’re in mind meld mode, it is so intuitive that you just know that you are ready for +1, and you blast off….
Sorry for the ramble. I’m trying to convey an idea above – that we try too hard. Here it is Sunday nite. Many of us are getting cranked up to reach all the kids for another week, and here this thread shows up to remind us that we aren’t Superman. Anyone relate? I mean, if all we have to do is deliver CI, then where’s the fire? Our CI fire trucks are on the way. What does it matter if we take Elm Street of Main Street? CI is the water that will put out the fire of insult that has burned so many American kids and MADE THEM FEEL STUPID and bad at languages. We have the goods. We deliver the goods. The water goes on the ashes of the traditional system. Kids feel better. They wash off the soot. They start laughing in class. They feel better about their ability to learn a language. That’s all I care about. That’s all I need to know.
Man, that was a ramble.
Many, many years ago when I came to France and found myself teaching adults, I bought a bunch a books about how to teach languages, mostly published by Oxford University Press. Today I remember very little about what they said, except for Fluency Writing, which was described and has always worked for me, long before I ever heard of TPRS, and a description of a study that really impressed me. Students taking a traditional content-based lecture course (not language, I think) were allowed to ask questions at the end of each lecture. At the end of the course they were given a test which was a compilation of the questions they had asked. What stood out was that each student had remembered the answer to their own question. And I think that’s how i+1 works. When the student asks the question, they are developmentally ready for the answer.
…when the student asks the question, they are developmentally ready for the answer….
Judy for President of France!