Here is the second article that goes with the one published yesterday:
What does it mean to breathe life into our instruction using comprehensible input? What does it mean to avoid specific activities/trees in favor of an overarching concept of CI/the forest? What does it mean to gain mastery over the method?
It means to take anything, talk about it in an imaginative fashion with your students, and then read it, spinning out more auditory CI during the reading and yes pointing out grammar but mainly keeping the translation process back into L1 going.
Mastery has nothing to do with output first. If enough input is there in the form of listening and reading, output mastery happens automatically. So mastery is really 100% dependent on providing our kids with enough input. Those 10,000 hours Gladwell suggests are, ironically, the same 10,000 hours that input provides in the mastery of a language. At some point on that time line, output emerges, but never without some thousands of hours of input to precede its emergence.
So you take something, a card, a reading, a song, something a kid says, a look on a kid’s face, something that just happened in the hallway, a current event, a blue bike, and you get out your figurative or actual nerf gun (read: learn to play while teaching), and you forget about hitting three target structures and doing three locations (there is no formula required for comprehensible input to work), and you start talking with the kids.
Don’t forget to enjoy yourself. Lay your nervousness aside as you feel the power of this kind of mastery, playing around in the forest and not getting bogged down with individual trees. Relax. Know that you have a great system that is working for you. Have fun.