This is a second repost from 2012 on the topic of whether or not instruction using comprehensible input can even work in our schools:
The recent discussions on:
– the massive amounts of responsibilities that we carry every day
– our inability to keep the comprehension comprehensible by keeping it confined to the unconscious minds of our students and thus only focuced on meaning
make me say again, as I have for years in this community:
I am not sure that we can get it done in schools.
Already published inquiries into this topic are:
https://benslavic.com/blog/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/02/23/oil-and-water/
This is not a joke, y’all. We say we are doing CI but we are not doing full on CI. Do we really getr get the “din” going in our classes? Is the flow of language effective? Maybe for a few teachers on certain days, but overall? Are doing teaching that is based on Krashen’s research? I’m not so sure.
A few months ago I dropped the ball on the DPS Beniko Mason study. I dropped the ball. Why? Because, of the six weeks I had for the study, at least half of that time was lost to bullshit involving my school’s schedule. There was too much bullshit going on.
I don’t know if we can do real CI work in schools.
Don’t forget Robert’s (in my view accurate) prediction that most teachers will NOT move well into the future and will resist this change mightily as per what Robert said here:
As positive as the ACTFL documents and the AP changes are, it will still take a while for the change to occur at the local level.
-Some people will resist the change until the day they walk out the classroom door for the last time
-Some people will think they are changing when they are merely re-formatting the same things they have already done
-Some people will simply flounder due to lack of training
-Some people will make slow progress in the right direction
-Some people will take to this naturally
The full change isn’t going to come until the profession is populated by people who have learned via TCI/TPRS and been trained in it. The other element is that universities have to get on board in their methods classes so that credential candidates know what’s out there.
There is a lot of encrustation that must be cleared away before we are free to sail away on the seas of authentic communication.
Is the entire storytelling method from top to bottom is too square to fit into the too round hole of education? I am not trying to sound the alarm button and and I am not implying here that it will never work. But I just want to keep thinking out of the box on what we do with what we know works best in teaching languages. Will this work?