This is one to read carefully and then re-read a few more times:
I haven’t dropped the iFLT page, and I don’t plan to, but not because I am learning that much, but because I am not going to stop pushing for best practices. I agree with Dr. Krashen we need to come together to push back against skill-based instruction, but just because we have a common problem, does not change my belief in CI. What I find silly is that Skills Teachers and those who push back against NTCI use the same arguments. Which makes dismantling them rather easy. They make claims like the classroom setting is not like the setting of L1 acquisition. Our students are not motivated like L1 learners or adults. There is not enough time to learn that way. Targeting helps me do my job. These are all well and good, but they DO NOTHING to change the way humans acquire language. This is all bunk. The context, the setting, the learners do NOT matter. Contextualized, Compelling, Comprehensible Input is the only way we acquire language. Everything else basically results in Language-Like Behavior. . IF your goal is for your students to complete tasks in class, then it does not matter. However, if you are teaching for proficiency, teaching toward real language acquisition, then this is something like trying to play a CD on a record player. You can put the disk on the turn-table, and you can even get it to spin, but you won’t be playing music. The resulting output that learners produce will not be real language, but instead merely language-like behavior. This is similar to memorizing dates in History class and then forgetting them after you take the quiz. The goal should be to create a complex network of information in the mind/brain that we call language.