I would like to suggest four formal goals for us for this year. The first two goals are contained in one short paragraph I received this summer from a PLC member in Los Angeles:
…at this point I need to be challenged on unconscious teaching assumptions that I probably am still carrying. I also have some challenges with my role as department chair for which I might seek help from this PLC….
Let’s talk about the first one in this series of three articles:
Goal #1: Challenging Unconscious Teaching Assumptions. To me, this means that the baggage many of us have brought with us into CI instruction from years of teaching in the past aren’t easily discarded, that they can sit there and creep into our new teaching unbeknownst to us.
I think that this is especially true with verb instruction. As 4%ers we just loved our verbs in high school and college and so we do stuff with our students that conflict with Krashen’s most radical assumption that learning a language is an unconscious process (see category on that topic (“Unconscious”) if you haven’t already – it is the base assumption of the pedagogy of this entire PLC and permeates everything we talk about).
Another example of how old ideas creep into our new teaching is how we teach greetings early in the year without every giving a thought to how hard they are for our kids. An article will address that point here tomorrow.
So I think that for our first goal this year we need to be ever vigilant with our base assumption that language learning is indeed an unconscious process and that our students can only acquire the language we are trying to teach them by focusing on the message and not the way words are spelled consciously and all that old mechanical conscious analysis stuff we used to do.
So that’s a good first goal for this year, to not waste instructional time by letting things we used to do in the past creep into our classes this year and eat up precious instructional minutes when we could be doing comprehensible input.