Using CI With Levels 2-4

2 thoughts on “Using CI With Levels 2-4”

1. Diane

   July 12, 2019 at 1:31 pm

   So happy that you clarified this! I am so relieved. This is what I was thinking all along. Now I can just concentrate on French I for this year and continue next year for the class in CI.

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2. Ben Slavic

   July 12, 2019 at 4:29 pm

   I’m glad my experience w trying to use stories with worksheet-trained kids has helped somebody. It about broke me. I even brought donuts every Friday for seven months to a morning AP class of 22 that knew less when they graduated than my level ones did in mid-year that year. Those privileged kids were in the class almost solely for the credit and the AP term on their college applications. They had had three different French teachers and their grammar was amazingly scrambled. Like scrambled eggs. It was what the worksheets did. And no teacher had actually done and CI. I was flabbergasted. No exaggeration there!

   I suppose that training kids out of worksheets CAN work, but only w certain kids and very rarely. Of course the worst ones to break are the seniors and it goes down from there. Sophomores are naturally snarky so level 2 is hard. If you have a strong and creative class of juniors who really want to learn the language, it can work in level 3. It depends on how many get the concept of language learning.

   Of course, if kids have been doing worksheets in middle school, then they are pretty much lost, unless you are able to do what has to be done.

   The profound question to ask in such cases is, why try? Their minds are gordian knots. Why try to untie it? Doing so is fool’s errand, for sure.Once that kind of damage is done, the result on an intellectual level on those kids is, if one can use the term – and one can and should get this perfidy out in the open – criminal.
   It’s like hiring someone to do some work that affects national security (our work does not just on linguistic levels but on cultural levels and “awareness” levels) and they screw it up. It’s not good for America, all these lost hours which total up into the millions each year, with smart kids, capable kids (all kids can learn a language) and spitting in their faces. Their bright hopeful faces which over the years through middle and high school fade so that their hope and optimism fades out, replaced by senior moments, but these are still children!

   And then Paul Sandrock, who once used the term communicative input to refer to Krashen’s work (I can prove it) leads an army of teachers who, bless their hearts, are hurting kids and therefore hurting the future of America. Change. Change. Change.

   Dian in the fall we want a full report here of the process next year. One more thing – when word gets out about how well your level ones are doing, you will get challenges from level 2 students who want to “learn that way”. Don’t bite. Say no. Then, after a month or two, put your hand on your chin and say, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t think it’ll work. You guys think that memorizing things teaches you the language.” They will protest, because they want in on the Invisibles (which are all over the back wall in the Gallery of One Word Images and ICIs). If you relent, give them two days. When they keep interrupting, bc no one has ever properly trained them, quit and go back to the book for a month or more. Avoid the leniency bc we all know that high school kids eat leniency for lunch. I’m not being mean. I’m speaking the truth of it.

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