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 way people acquire languages. Word lists have nothing to do with it.
But the resistance to TPRS, started in earnest by the deer-in-the-headlights traditional language teaching community, turned into a full-fledge adoration of word lists. Even the TPRS movement started to embrace the lists in terms of “high frequency verb lists” and other semantic or thematic lists with “words that had to be learned” in them.
What is the problem with that? Learning lists of words is not how people acquire languages! People don’t acquire languages by memorizing lists of targeted words, but rather by listening to the language in ways that are interesting to them and in ways that they can understand.
Perhaps that heavily researched idea is too simple. Perhaps the lack of guard rails (structure or form) is too much for the old guard kind of language teacher, and so they tried to provide that structure by using CI to force their kids to memorize word lists. No blame. The ignorance is thick.
The BIGGEST problem is that CI is an unconscious process and memorization involves the conscious mind.
It doesn’t matter. A proper balance between form (a CI curriculum that works) and function (the language as a whole) has not yet happened.
The real winners of this eroding away of the CI research by the well-intentioned traditionalists – the unfortunate splitting of the CI world into different “camps” with various “experts” representing each camp – were the textbook companies.
Well, standing next to the textbook victors on the podium of WL curriculum design – so long now after having been delivered that first great gut punch by Blaine Ray – is the idea of testing. Testing continues to provide a neat way to blow apart the fledgling CI movement.
Testing and the textbook – victors. And notice that both podium winners are about profits more than what kind of language instruction is best for kids. Hmmm….
