Re: the mixing of methods, to be clear, we can probably do some of the old grammar stuff and some CI in our classrooms, if we must or are new TPRS and it is freaking us out, but we shouldn’t employ the two at the same time in our classrooms.
Do part of class with the book if you must and another part of class in pure uninterrupted L2 CI. That’s fine. But don’t try to mix them into a lesson at the same time. The time not spent on CI is a waste, but if it makes you feel better as you make the transition, go for it. And no snark in that last comment.
Trying to mix CI with conscious left brain analytical work conflicts directly with Krashen’s very important term “The Din”. Heard language – the kind that sticks – is and should be a din to the mind, and the deeper mind likes that din.
The deeper mind is the <strong>language processing boss</strong> – it can acquire any language it hears enough of. But the conscious mind is NOT a boss of any kind. It just fools you into thinking it is, to the great detriment of millions of kids every day. The conscious mind is <strong>way too weak </strong>to handle the voltage of real acquisition – only the deeper mind can perform the deep and nearly infinite calculations that lead to acquisition.
It is a fact that what seems to be a din to the conscious mind is far from that to the deeper mind boss, which takes everything it hears in a day and runs it through the big unconscious computerized language acquisition system during deep sleep that night and that is when and where acquisition happens.
You don’t have to like that fact. And you won’t like it if you want your job to be about making your students study out of books and using computer programs and analyzing and breaking down things and parsing things consciously and then you get to be in control of class! But that bores the crap out of kids.
The deeper mind parses languages millions of times faster than the conscious mind, and with no visible effort. It is like a gift from God. It IS a gift from God. Treat it that way. Quit with power trip.You’re not in charge of your students’ learning – their deeper minds are. You can be of service to that process or not by providing your students with plenty of high quality CI. But it wouldn’t be anything new if you didn’t.
Accept the gift in gratitude. Don’t be so full of pride that you think you can teach someone a language. You can’t. You aren’t that talented. You can only present the language to them in large quantities of input that they can understand. The students’ deeper mind bosses will then do the rest and you will be amazed at what the kids can do over time.
Give it up. Embrace comprehension based instruction as fundamentally a completely unconscious process and a fine thing at that. Just do it. We don’t aquire languages by thinking or talking about them. We just need to hear and read them. A lot. Period.