Warning- This reposted article from 2011 could also be titled An Out of Control Ramble in Defense of Comprehensible Input. Skip it.
I really like how our group takes responsibility for making sure that we keep the focus on CI. We own it. We practice it. We come back and talk about it here. We share when we get attacked for doing what we know is best for the kids. I like that part too. But the main thing I like is that we make it clear with others in our group in our daily discussions that we don’t think of CI as merely another tool in the tool box but as the tool box itself and the tools in it and everything else in the back of the pickup truck that drives us to work with the goal of enjoying our lives as language teachers instead of continuously and fruitlessly doing that old nonsense that doesn’t work, mixing English with the target language in a kind of teaching hell. Been there done that. No thanks, I’ve had enough. Gotta go. I hear the whistle blowing on the CI train. Bye. I like that we know that, once we have said something, anything, we then have to circle it and move it into acquisition by our students. That’s called CI. If we don’t circle it and move it into acquisition by our students, then that’s not CI. I like how we don’t leave words that have not been acquired in the moments of teaching hanging out there, unacquired. I like that. We don’t say something in the TL and then think to ourselves, “Oh maybe they got that” but rather we insist on staying on that one expression until they have got it. That’s called owning our teaching. We stay parked on it until we have said it in many many different ways, giving the fast acquirers plenty of extra humor-filled reps on it while giving the slower acquirers the reps they need to fully get it. What an art form! No, CI is not a technique of teaching, it IS teaching. Sounds fanatical – we are “those TPRS nuts”. No we aren’t. There is nothing fanatical about making sure that our students understand us in class. Making ourselves understood by kids is our JOB and we can’t play it off as anything else. All we have to do is make ourselves understood. We don’t have to focus so much on what we do in terms of stories, PQA, One Word Images, CWB, reading, etc. – we may even do that too much here. Fine, and we are very good at that here if you look at the teaching strategies that we have created together over the years. BUT the real deal is that we could take one little sentence and write it on the board to start class and spend a week expanding it up the taxonomy and that is how we know that what we do is real bc we move UP the taxonomy to acquisition and not DOWN the taxonomy to mere learning. Really, we can take one sentence or just one word and that is enough to roll out a smorgasbourg of meaningful and fun CI. That’s the key idea. We need to focus and worry so much less on what we are doing and so much more on how we are doing it. We do CI. That’s the cool part. We actually do it. We don’t bury Krashen’s work in some book and say his work with comprehension based instruction and his hypotheses and all he offers us is part of a larger picture. We know that it IS the picture and the frame and the viewer and the museum too. CI to me means that if it is something that we sense should not be said because the kids aren’t ready, we don’t say it. It is a constant governing of how much and what kind of language structures we allow into our instruction. It is a meditation in making ourselves comprehended by our students at all times. We own it. We own it and take action. Like when Krashen was in my classroom for two classes once when he happened to be in Denver and Diana calmed me down by saying, “Don’t worry about your lesson plans [I had none and never do except the fake ones I turn in] – just do CI!” (I don’t actually use lesson plans bc they get in the way by making me focus on teaching ‘something’ instead of what I should be focused on – making myself understood. There is a huge difference in the zeitgeist of language instruction there, between teaching ‘something’ instead of doing my real job of making myself understood by them).” And so I did teach some very hard and distant kids that day with Krashen and Beniko Mason in there and it went all right. I had nothing that day except my rudder – my Anne Matava story – and the image of the rudder in the stream is an excellent one to convey what I am trying to say here. The rudder that was the story allowed me to stay the course for CI and not get bogged down in the mud of over-explaining and using English too much. I like the way that we know that by continuously making ourselves comprehendend by our class simply by using the target language like a hammer, by constantly being in touch with what they know, by listening to the kids and what they aren’t saying to us because they can’t because they aren’t allowed the English, by making eye contact with them that is sprinkled with a feeling of happiness, we send them the message that engaging them is important to us. I like that we own it once it’s out of our mouths. I like that what comes our of our mouths isn’t rejected by them bc they know that they either a) already know it or b) will know it because we will have repeated it enough for them in the moments of that class period, so that they learn to trust us and relax in the sure knowledge that we, not they, are responsible for giving them enough reps on every single thing that comes out of our mouths. We assure the success of our students because it is our job and we do not make our instruction into a kind of conscious mind dominant form of mental gymnastics for them. We keep them focused only on the message. It shouldn’t be difficult for the kids. That’s another thing I like about CI – how for the kids CI when properly done is effortless and, as we get better at it ourselves, it also gets a lot easier for us with time. How about that? And I thought teaching languages sucked. And those who still worship at the alter of research and data gathering – good luck with that. I don’t need any research to prove that my kids are learning. Their faces when learning provide me with plenty of research. We used to need research because all language students used to have faces that hid everything but that is no longer true, so that changes the importance of the research. We are the ones getting paid and we should be the ones making ourselves clear by getting the reps and offering the lightheartedness and cheerfulness and staying on the structure as long as is necessary so that they’re not even aware that they are learning, so focused are they on the message and not the individual words, all the while revealing a kind of happiness that honestly makes my job fun after all those years of wondering what the hell I was doing in teaching. The key message here in this ramble is that we own our instruction once it’s out of our mouths. We said it, and now we have to circle it. Every time. If it’s new to them we have to establish meaning and get reps. So we learn to avoid introducing too much new stuff, focusing only on the structures that we have for that day. It doesn’t matter what they are. The mind has its own order of acquisition so who are we to plan structures? We don’t need to plan so much, all we have to do is bring the CI. And then not say stuff that they don’t understand. This strength in us to discern what we say before we say it, all in the flow – that is a good word to search on this site – is a capacity that we must develop in ourselves as individual teaching artists to not say it unless we are going to repeat it enough or unless they already know it. We don’t say things to them that they don’t know. How do we know what they know or don’t know? We just know. It is a gift that this method brings to us. The ability to know what they know is something that always amazed me about watching Blaine teach. Anyway, in this ramble I repeat once more again to myself how I don’t ever have to worry in my classroom because the language will convey itself if I just provide the CI in the form of SLOW circling, choral response single answers, until I am sure that they understand, until I am sure that the input I have provided for my students that day has been fully comprehended by them.
