Just to reiterate. I see technology really helping, serving beautifully, my students, outside of the classroom. It helps them process so many things that are interesting to them, from songs, sometimes even in communication with kids from other countries, and so technology is a wonderful and beautiful thing for learning languages. It has its place.
But, for me at least, that place is not in the classroom, unless it is in authentic service to the CI. Until someone describes exactly and clearly how that can happen, I’m going with the human thing in my classroom. People who use technology but don’t succeed in using it to serve, embellish, illustrate comprehensible input, aren’t serving the kids during instructional time. Of course, when technology is shown to work in the delivering of massive CI, that is a different story.
What is technology that is not used in the service of comprehensible input? Noise. It is a chance to speak English for the kids, who are always looking for one, bless their hearts. The only way that the language can be absorbed, in my opinion, is through comprehensible input and the strict avoidance of L1, really, about 98% of the time.
In a blog entry last March I touched on how the brain can learn the language by itself and doesn’t need any help. Here is the link:
https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=6456
We must change that which to us is obvious. It is obvious to us that machines in a classroom which play with language activities can help learners learn the language. It is obvious but I am not convinced it’s true, however. It conflicts with what Krashen says. He says that comprehensible input is what teaches learner languages, and I agree with him. So can a machine deliver high quality comprehensible input? I went to college in Missouri, so show me.
Teachers who think of the machines* in their classrooms as really cool new tools to teach language, seeing CI as just another tool, miss Krashen’s point, much to the great detriment of their students, that language acquisition is a human activity and demands human interaction.
Teachers who use technology that is full of bells and whistles, and therefore that entertains the kids, don’t yet appreciate that language is a social, participatory, reciprocal, back and forth, human activity that occurs at a much more subtle level in comprehensible input than it does in robotic instruction.
We are not in our classrooms to entertain the kids but to instruct them. We cannot let them look at some machine as if it is a TV. We must make them show up in the instructional process and do 50% of the work going on in the classroom.
*exceptions such as twexted songs are probably one of many exceptions to my ranting above (other exceptions welcome here as comments) because they, in fact, can serve the purpose of delivering interesting and meaningful comprehensible input to the students, depending on how we use them, and I for one haven’t figured that out yet. I want to get better at it. Anything that can be spun into a story is CI, and songs can be spun into stories. Whenever I use a twexted song I tell the kids in advance which stanza we will discuss in the target language and so to really focus on it while they listen to the song (otherwise the class would last for hours). But activities on machines that don’t include CI aren’t going to help. Technology must exist in the service of CI, not in service of itself. Otherwise it would be the machines taking over in exciting but fairly useless activities that only look cool to administrators and teachers and students who don’t get CI. Machines taking over, looking like friends. Hmmm.
Related posts:
https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7385
https://benslavic.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=7296&action=edit