Trying to find a certain building in New York City’s canyons and complexities is not easy. I suggest that we avoid building a New York City out of our work with comprehensible input. I sense that many of us are making mini New Yorks in our classrooms. We can’t seem to dive off the high dive and just let go. We don’t seem to want to develop a way of teaching that is non-violent to our aching minds. Why?
We study CI and then, unconsiously, we start trying to make it conform to stuff we used to do in our classrooms before we made the breathtaking breakthrough to Krashen.
And then we screw it up because we get confused trying to fit Krashen into the old model of what teaching was to us and many of us stray from or quit the very thing that, had we kept it simple, might have provided us with the map out of the mental stink that describes the canyons of traditional teaching hell.
We can’t water CI down. At its base, it is a most simple and elegant thing. It can’t be jacked around into a lot of different kinds of “activities”. Then we would be allowing a thought form that we grew up with in teaching to contaminate the new model. We don’t need a lot of new CI activities. Comprehensible input is pristinely capable of bringing acquisition by itself.
We should be staying with what works. We should get an interesting topic – in the past year I have found that (1) drawings generated by students do that best, and many of us are finding that (2) stories used for Story Listening also generate high interest – and ask our students tons of yes/no questions and just have fun letting new fun ideas come into the story.
Then after that we take the CI that we got during (1) and (2) above and we write it up into the form of a reading, and we use our the reading options to process it with our students, and we’re good.
I know from experience that this simple approach to doing comprehensible input in my classroom works better than anything else, and when I do it my students acquire much more than if I did anything else. We need to learn to focus more on providing good comprehensible input to our students and not worry so much about the right strategy or activity or “new thing”.
Stephen Krashen seems to have decided to allow a watering down of his ideas in the CI community. I don’t know why.