There is now a twin book to the Ultimate CI Books, but for middle school. It’s a beauty and perfect for middle school language instruction. It’s not on my website yet but will be there in the next month.
By the way, I’m changing the name of the Ultimate CI Books for reasons having to do with the mangling effect over the past 20 years of the term “comprehensible input” by various actors. I’ve accordingly removed all references to the term CI from those books.
The bottom line is that I can no longer honestly say that I write and train people about CI. I have watched closely over the past ten years as the term CI has slowly morphed into something else, having lost its sparkle and indeed its very meaning.
The studly term that Krashen coined so long ago – perhaps the most important term ever to come out of language research – is now a ringwraithish version of itself, and so I won’t use it anymore.
So the new name of the Ultimate CI Books, as of now, is Teaching Languages in High School. Its focal point is, of course, the StarChart™ .
The current name of the new book is Teaching Languages in Middle School, and the focal point of that work is the new SquareChart™.
The SquareChart™ is a vastly simplified version of the StarChart™, and is for teachers who teach those 7th grade survey language classes lasting from six to twelve weeks, but can be used in any year-long middle or high school class as well, because it’s so damn good.
Who would ever have guessed that I just can’t see using the term comprehensible input anymore? This corruption and re-branding of the term in our profession is not unlike how in the field of politics new terms are created to fool people, in the way that the term “right to work” is code for “oppressing people”, to give just one example.
When will it end? Will our field one day resemble a big book fair where Blaine Ray and Carol Gaab sell their novels and the actual use of CI occurs in our profession as a beat up old trailer being dragged along by the textbook industry, filled with cash from unsuspecting teachers who once had hope that their careers could be enhanced by CI?
