This is a repost from many years ago. The information in it cannot be repeated enough. Many of us fail to look in the right place for the solution to the problem of not reaching our students with our comprehensible input instruction in the way we want. We think we need new strategies, that the ones we learned at the last conference we attended didn’t work. But the primary reason teachers have trouble reaching their students with CI is that they speak too fast in class. It’s as simple as that.
Speaking too fast disempowers students. Speaking to your students at a slow pace indicates respect. When you speak slowly you acknowledge that you appreciate how hard it is for your students to understand the new and quite foreign language.
To quote Blaine Ray:
“The reason we have to go so slowly is that we can’t feel how hard it is. We have a feeling that the language is easy because that is our experience. By slowing down much more than we believe is necessary or possible, we are getting close to the best speed. We can only feel this by learning another language.”
Blaine implies two things here:
- that the proper speed is going to feel awkward to us, and
- that empathy is a necessary ingredient in delivering comprehensible input to a class. One must put oneself in the position of the learner, and feel how hopeless one can feel when one does not understand what is going on.
In general, one could say that one of the primary reasons for many of the overall failures in the American educational system is that teachers routinely speak to their students, in all subjects, using rates of words per minute that exceed the capacity of high school students to understand them.