I find it outrageous that teachers have to so often jump through so many hoops justifying their decision to teach using comprehensible input. Such pride in those they work for and with! We ought to just come out and say it and get it over with: trying to learn via textbooks and worksheets when using primarily English is just the wrong thing to do. No discussion on that. Here’s why:
For thousands of years, children learned languages by listening to them. Meaningful speech that they could understand with zero effort was all that they knew, so the languages they heard were easy for them. In fact, they learned how to understand and speak without their conscious minds being involved at all, as if by magic.
Adults would say things to children that had meaning. They would look them in the eyes, tell them stories, pausing if they didn’t understand, and look for their reaction, while smiling and laughing, perhaps singing them songs, and, on a good day, even chanting.
Because adults asked them lots of questions about things that mattered to them, the kids learned the language because they cared about what was being discussed, not because they cared about learning the language. They learned the language automatically as a result of focusing on the message.
Then, for the first time since they started learning languages, in schools, kids found that they could be wrong. Adults in schools didn’t use the language to talk to the kids about things that were interesting to them. They started talking to them about the actual language itself, how it was built, what an adverb was, and what a stem changing verb is. This threw most kids for a loop.
The more that kids were forced to analyze the language, and then take tests on how well they could memorize lists of words and grammar rules, the more convinced they became that they were bad at learning languages. They saw that their success in school depended on their ability to grasp ideas that were completely boring to all but a few of them.
This way of doing things had predictable results. Kids didn’t learn the language. Many gave up and put their heads on their desks. It all felt wrong to them, especially the low grades on the tests and the fact that they couldn’t say anything in the language even after years of study. Their only conclusion was that they were incapable of learning a language.
But then researchers started appearing towards the latter part of the 20th century who claimed that languages can be learned, if only the learner’s focus was put on the message and not on the language itself. This was a breakthrough idea and one that exactly describes the way it had been done before the schools got hold of the process.
The new idea was, of course, really the way it was done in the first place – to get the learner so interested in the message that the kids forgot that they were even learning a language. The overarching term for this more traditional and humane way of learning languages, before schools changed the rules on the kids, is “comprehensible input”.
The reader who has not yet done so is encouraged to research the term comprehensible input and, along with it, the name of its originator, Dr. Stephen Krashen, whose ideas have led us back to ways of teaching languages in which the learners are allowed once again, in happiness and without fear of being judged, to focus on the message and not on the language, by letting the deeper mind, where language acquisition actually happens, to take over the process, since it does such a better job of it.
This would redefine the role of the language teacher to one who just speaks in the language to the learners in low-stress ways that are interesting to them, and in ways that they can understand without having to involve their conscious minds, instead of being a “language teacher”.
This site dedicated to all people involved in education who understand the important role of bringing meaning back into what we do, all of us, when we try to teach a language.