Teaching a language without using comprehensible input is insulting to the magnificence of the human brain, which can process and decode and implement thousands of rules of language without even needing to use its conscious side – it’s all automatic. All that the brain needs to acquire a language is to hear the language spoken correctly in a way that the learner can understand and everything then falls into place for eventual fluency.
Making learning languages a conscious thing is just insulting to the unconscious elegant flow that characterizes the way we really learn languages. How can we honor this process, which is so beautiful, when we do our jobs in a way that is in opposition to this elegance? This hubris, this failure to implement a natural way of teaching languages that is in line with what is so natural and powerful and perfect, is not, has never been, and can never be, successful.
We who teach languages owe it to our students to teach them in a way that honors what lies unconscious in the human mind, latent but for our mastery of this new way of teaching. Are we, who have come to understand and implement the power of the process of CI in our classrooms, not totally relieved to learn that there really was a way to teach that worked?
Are we not relieved to know that there really was a way to teach that produces real fluency, that is much less labor intensive, that is much more emotionally satisfying, and, enfin, et puis, alors, not so gnarly?
Yes, the brain can learn a language by itself. That changes the equation, if ever anything did.