Oddly, we have assumed that if we give our students enough CI, they will learn the language.
And, while CI is definitely the only way that a human being can learn a language, with no apologies to those who many cling to another point of view, because you’re wrong, we haven’t yet taken a close enough look at the time factors involved. What does this mean?
It takes about nine months for a human being to be made. Any more or less and there are problems. It takes about four months in a garden to get from a seed to a cornstalk. Those aren’t arbitrary time frames, right? Change them and the whole plan for the baby and the corn fails. Hmmm.
I guess we’re the exception. I guess the four years of constant input required to get to even rudimentary speech and writing are not true with languages. We’ve got four years, 500 hours, roughly 12.5 forty hour weeks with our kids, and we can make it happen because we as teachers get a rider on the time requirement for languages. After all, we’re teachers. It’s different. People who don’t teach wouldn’t know.
We teach! We can get the kids to think long and hard enough about it (not!) and we can get the job done! O.K. we know that thinking about the language and talking about it in another language doesn’t work. That’s not the point of this essay. Just wanted to say that again. Because some people still believe that they can teach a language by using English and talking about grammar. WTF?
No, in this essay I am suggesting that the time we have in class over the course of the year is not enough to do much of anything in the way of getting a kid to the level of acquisition in a second language, and, in particular, to any kind of meaningful output. What are we thinking? That’s my question – what are we thinking?
Let’s not go into the 125 vs. 12,000 hours conversation that props up here every two months like clockwork. Those are just numbers and even the researchers admit to not being able to pinpoint exactly how long is necessary to acquire a language using comprehensible input. But my point follows from this idea. It takes a hell of a long time. What are we thinking?
Are we not all Tarot Fools, skipping along the edge of the precipice, confident that we are doing good work towards acquisition, with our little dogs following along behind us? Do we really think that four years of CI is enough? And, if we do, could we articulate what “enough” means?
Oh well, I’d rather be a fool than a tradition teacher, because it’s a lot more fun. I will never stop teaching this way. I have never had more fun in my life than the past twelve years of doing stories and thinking up other insane ways to reach kids in the great French language. So I’m a fool, big whoop. I already know that!
But I do want to bring to the attention of the group the rather insane idea that we go into our buildings every day thinking that we can actually do this, except to say that it is something we need to think about, because it really is kind of nutty.
Because if we try to get our students to do more with language than is possible, well, we’re nuts. That is why this article is going under the important Mental Health category here.
And no, I wouldn’t ever stop with CI, because, as I said, these past twelve years of doing CI have been the best ever for me, and have affected my personal life deeply because I like going in to work every day. So, thank you again Susan Gross. Thank you doesn’t even come close to expressing my thanks to you for your guiding me along, fool that I am.