Our discussion of what CI is continues:
Here is how Wikipedia defines Dr. Stephen Krashen’s approach:
…the natural approach is a method of language teaching developed by Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It aims to foster naturalistic language acquisition in a classroom setting, and to this end it emphasizes communication, and places decreased importance on conscious grammar study and explicit correction of student errors. Efforts are also made to make the learning environment as stress-free as possible. In the natural approach, language output is not forced, but allowed to emerge spontaneously after students have attended to large amounts of comprehensible language input…
Dr. Krashen’s ideas have thus led us back to ways of teaching languages in which the learners are allowed to once again, in happiness and without fear of being judged, focus on the message and not on the language, by letting the deeper mind, where language acquisition actually happens, take over the process, since it does such a better job of it.
This would redefine the role of the language teacher to one who just speaks in the language to the learners in low-stress ways that are interesting to them, and in ways that they can understand without having to involve their conscious minds, instead of being a “language teacher.”