We would assume that the foxes guarding the hen houses, the grammar teachers who need to “cover the imperfect” (referring to what Melissa just said here), do so out of ignorance.
Anyone who has experienced teaching kids a language using both comprehensible input and grammar would know that CI works far better than any grammar program ever could. So why do those teachers cling to the old ways?
People have said that it is because it is simply easier to use the book, but I don’t buy that. I have taught many years both ways, and grammar instruction is truly painful for the teacher, as the class divides instantly into the few haves and the many have knots. It creates headaches rarely unseen in the truly Krashen based classroom.
Others say that teachers cling to the old grammar ways because the CI is too difficult to do. I can’t buy that one either. It’s not. It just requires that we redefine our sense of what our kids can do, and of what intelligence is.
Slowly circling sentences in L2 is not difficult! The truth is that we have to redefine our own sense of what is possible for us as teachers, and many of don’t want to do that.
We need to scrape the fussiness and dull didactic narrowmindedness out of our teaching minds. Or we could remain adults who lie to kids at a time of their young lives when that is already done in many many other areas of their lives.
As Ken Robinson said in a TED link once :
“….human communities depend upon a diversity of talent and not a singular conception of ability…”.
If we are to do that, we have to appeal to all the learning styles of our kids and, because learning a language is not a purely mental but a physical and emotional thing, we must now change.
In the same TED speech (2010), Robinson quoted Abraham Lincoln:
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present…As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”
Grammar/book based teachers are hypnotized. They are enthralled, fixed on one thing. They must disenthrall themselves. They must loose themselves of that which they take for granted (that grammar and books work to learn a language).