Up To 75 - Ben Slavic

For those who have been reading here for years, you may remember that the pro-NTCI points in a series of articles that began appearing here about ten years ago keept growing. We’re up to 75. That’s a lot of points to support NTCI!

Here’s the newest list:

Below are 75 points worth reflecting on:

NTCI is easy to learn. It doesn’t require a lot of expensive training in the form of workshops and conferences. The majority of teachers who start doing it (via the Ultimate CI Book series) report great results right away.
Targeting specific words from high frequency verb/word lists, thematic units, semantic sets, etc. requires planning. This planning, according to the research, diminishes student engagement and interest, as per Dr. Krashen.
With the loss of spontaneity that targeting words brings, the joy of simple human communication is greatly reduced. Communication – the Standard – needs to be interesting and not robotic. NTCI brings real communication in the CI classroom.
The big focus of NTCI on building community goes a long way in solving the biggest problem in American foreign language classrooms that the vast majority of students don’t know how to interact with their teachers or peers in class.
The vastly simplified data-gathering and grading procedures in NTCI are in harmony with the soul of comprehension-based instruction.
By not aligning with thematic units or semantic sets, interest in NTCI classes is not constrained. It is one thing to talk about language flow – flow being a huge word in Krashen’s research – but another to teach in a way that supports it.
The purpose in NTCI is not to teach words from lists but to teach language from images. This keeps the focus of the learner on the language as a whole, and not on pieces of the language so that the students can pass a test on the words for the rooms in a house.
In NTCI there is a far greater alignment with the pure research. Instead of pushing the language into a corner of the bedroom, or a kitchen or living room, or down the staircase, or into a list of any kind for the purpose of testing in order to grade the child on her ability to learn words out of context, we expand rich contextual language into the whole house.
The results of teaching within context are: (1) a more interesting story, (2) less conscious focus on words to learn, (3) more and easier focus on meaning, (4) no planning for the instructor, (5) a more expansive and less reductive language experience, (6) more fuel for the Din during sleep, (7) more contextualized learning, (8) a much-lowered affective filter, (9) language instruction that aligns more with the research, and (10) more authentic Communication.
Backwards planning of chapters in novels doesn’t work because it is impossible to teach all the vocabulary in an entire chapter – there are too many words. The idea that one could prepare a novel by isolating vocabulary from a chapter and doing stories to prepare for the reading of that chapter is a flawed idea and should never have been allowed into the pedagogy.
Dogs learn words individually, words like “Sit” or “Fetch” or “Stay”. As humans, we require richer, more contextual input. So, it is probably best that we learn languages in context, and not from individual lists of words where CI is used with the goal of making sure that certain individual vocabulary words have been learned (for what reason?).
When we target vocabulary using CI, we sell out the research so we can bow down to curriculum designs that are based on textbook models and therefore out of touch with the research.
The ACTFL proficiency guidelines are “holistic” and not specific to learning certain words or grammar concepts. NTCI reflects this point exactly.
Targeting asks the instructor to make up specific random sentences using specific (targeted) words within the context of a larger curricular/textbook need. Try that in English right now. It just doesn’t work. I think that’s one of the biggest stumbling blocks that many capable teachers have run up against with targeting – it’s just awkward.
There is no consensus in SLA research of when something is “acquired” because we don’t really know what is going on in our students’ brains – we can’t measure it. To try to measure acquisition is therefore impossible. This fact is fully respected in how we assess in NTCI instruction.
If a teacher really wants to use CI to teach a list of high frequency words, etc. they should not do it in the creation of the story. They should teach those words in embedded fashion during the reading of the story, if they have to do it at all.
When I was using the TPRS skill of Circling, I would very often get an automatic, almost predictable eye roll from my students. But I would keep up my fake smile going like I was enjoying it, but inside I wanted to scream. This does not happen in NTCI because circling is not used.
One thing about Circling is that it demands a certain natural ability to communicate on the part of the teacher. If the teacher has that quality, the communication will take place even though circling as a CI instructional skill tends to water down the level of interest. But if the teacher lacks this natural communicative ability – and there is no blame nor any reason to expect them to have it if they were trained in the old way – Circling can be a real problem.
Many traditional CI teachers have expressed their concern that NTCI is not “organized” enough. But the research shows us that “organized” language (being taught from a list of words in order to teach those particular words vs. natural language (no lists), is just more boring to the kids. Such instruction lacks spontaneity, which is the very definition of language. Would you rather have students who aren’t interested or students who are engaged?
Allowing students to ask grammar questions during class when the non-targeted language is flowing is not done in NTCI. In my view, the short interruption back to L1 (a) throws off the flow of language for the rest of the class, (b) is often nothing but a way for some kids to draw attention to themselves and (c) derails the unconscious process and flow of language identified by Krashen as at the heart of language acquisition.
In NTCI there is no class reading of novels, which practice allows a few faster processing students from more privileged backgrounds to skew the discussion of the book in their favor. In NTCI, the students read novels at their own pace. This is in keeping with the research.
In NTCI the students are not asked personalized questions, which causes tension. Rather, questions are asked about images they have drawn, which process is far more interesting and less personally intimidating to them. They create these images individually or as a class and it is wonderful.
In NTCI we don’t need to establish meaning and then practice certain words or word chunks. What I mean here by “establishing meaning” is the practice of saying what words mean before starting the story, because of course in truth we are always establishing meaning as we go along through the story.
We are not teaching individual words – we are teaching the language as a whole. The brain does better with language as a whole than language in parts. The process is a natural one.
Krashen’s Natural Order of Acquisition Hypothesis states that acquisition is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught. The deeper mind is in charge and makes its own decisions about what sounds it turns into meaning and when.
Words are added to the growing language system in sleep, after hearing input that is interesting/compelling and understandable during the day. We’re not in control and we should act like that in the classroom. We merely deliver the CI. We do not deliver “instructional services”.
In NTCI, the students should be able to enjoy the right to listen in a quiet and relaxed and focused way and not have to perform. Having kids supply cute answers puts stress on them and is linked to privilege because it favors the louder, bolder, and more socially-gifted students. This tends to divide the classroom along socioeconomic lines, as is happening at all levels of American society today.
NTCI rarely uses gesturing as a group. Gesturing as a group brings the conscious part of the brain into play. It also invites copycatting. In NTCI the students’ minds are freed up to concentrate fully on turning the sounds they are hearing into meaning without all the pressure to perform.
In NTCI the stories last 30-40 minutes. Once the students know that they will most likely know what is going to happen at the end of the story in that class period, they focus better. The students need for the story to end that class period.
Very early on we were trained (at the national conferences) that the stories were not important, that the content was not important, and that we were supposed to be doing reps of targets. But the students cared a lot about the stories, because they were invested, and they wanted to know what happened. When they started to realized that they probably wouldn’t find out what happened by the end of class that day, the air came quickly out of the storytelling balloon by mid-year.
No planning is needed in NTCI. This greatly reduces stress which enhances our mental health right at a time when mental health issues are taking over our profession and making what should be a relatively enjoyable job into a form of mild mental torture.
In NTCI the students create images that become their own wonderful sources of non-targeted discussion. In that way, if a student does not know who a particular celebrity is, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want a section of the class – the cool kids who know the celebrities – running the class. Making up our own characters is so much more fun!
In NTCI we have lots of alternatives to stories, so we don’t have to do a story when we aren’t having the best day. Stories in the Star Sequence curriculum take on a minor role to set up the other activities of the Star. Now we can work the reading options, extend things out with the Word Chunk Team Game, etc. It doesn’t have to be all about stories.
The Questioning Level process is completely non-targeted. Those seven questioning levels and the optional question sets provide a safe set of golden rails for the CI train to go down. It is a safe process for the teacher, and highly structured.
Teachers who are just learning the NTCI method can literally stand on the laminated cards to make sure her class never goes off the rails.
NTCI prevents dominance of the classroom by the few. Observe a non-targeted classroom. Classes based on images are not just interesting, they are very often compelling, which naturally involves everyone and not just the few. It’s what we want.
NTCI allows teachers to bring their own personality into the classroom. NTCI teachers don’t have to be cute and entertaining all the time, because the NTCI process based on the creation of images is intrinsically cute in itself, and because the class content is generated by the students. Interesting student-generated input drives the class, not the teacher.
In NTCI, when creating stories, we don’t require students to draw complex images with lots of panels right away. The artists in level 1 classes create two panels (problem and solution); in level 2 they create 4 panels; in level 3 six panels are created, and level 4 creates 8 panels.
In the NTCI classroom the role of artwork assumes a much greater role in the development of the story. The class galleries stimulate student interest in ways not often seen in a language classroom. Images drive the learning. It’s fantastic.
In NTCI we don’t TPR words. TPR has always seemed artificial and kind of lame to me, keeping interest for only a few minutes at the most and pulling the discussion out of the waters that CI really wants to always swim in – context.
In NTCI, the teacher doesn’t always have to try to be the dynamic, in-charge personality with star quality. She can be self-effacing and quiet if she wants. She can be herself. She can listen to her students carefully, and effortlessly roll in whatever direction the conversation goes. The model of the lion tamer, master of CI ceremonies, person on stage is not in line with Krashen, Vygotsky, etc.
According to some CI experts, “breakdown” is a concern. Breakdown is when a student answers a question but shows hesitation and the teacher, upon seeing this in the student, says to herself, “we need to practice the sentence more”. But students are there to listen and absorb what they can in a general way (an unconscious process), not to be taught a certain sentence (a conscious process).
It is in their ongoing flow that we learn languages, not in the focusing on any specific parts of the flow. We do ask yes/no questions in NTCI but we don’t continually monitor our students’ responses, preferring rather to let the Din happen as per Krashen. Do we break contextual messages down when learning our first language? Looking for breakdown is like hammering the input in one nail at a time when no nails are needed.
In NTCI, it’s just waves and waves of pleasant comprehensible input (easy on the student and the teacher both) and some of it goes in and some doesn’t and then when the students sleep the process of parsing out some words as “ready to be accepted” (acquired) into the growing language system or not happens.
The unconscious process or acquiring a language is under our unconscious command and so why “practice” it? Why look for things that the kids can’t yet do? Doing that activates conscious thinking and awareness of the possibility of being wrong, at which point the affective filter kicks in and that is not how the research says it happens. In fact, it is exactly the activation of the affective filter that causes the student to lock up, to “breakdown”.
In NTCI we don’t go for language correctness, correct points of view, SV agreement, etc. from students. This includes from actors. When we ask students to repeat after us mechanically, we are setting ourselves up to judge the student.
What we really do in NTCI is get a kind of smile on our faces and invite our students to play, maybe repeating the sentence histrionically, for the purpose of laughing. It’s all about keeping the affective filter down so that acquisition can occur by osmosis and via the Din, which the research says is how it happens.
In NTCI we don’t ask new teachers to “dive right in” to stories after one conference. Instead, we bring them along slowly from tableaux to stories and finally, when they are ready, we apply the questioning level process to the creation of stories, which brings the needed clarity to the teacher who is working hard to slough off the old pedagogy of conscious thinking/memorization, etc.
In NTCI, the primacy of the physical presence of the teacher as kind and inviting, soft and not judging, is key. In NTCI relational dynamics are the cornerstone to comprehension, engagement and maintaining attention. This is not true in targeted CI classrooms, where learning the list is more important than engaging students in the real (human) way.
In NTCI there is not a long list of pedagogical “to-do’s”, rules, etc. that prevent the teacher from doing the only thing they need to do – converse in a light-hearted way with her students.
In NTCI reading, we don’t teach specialized vocabulary beforehand so that a class can read the chapter in the novel. If we are tasked with teaching a group of foreign nurses who need the medical vocabulary before they can start working in the profession, they will not learn the terms they wish to learn until the bedrock of their language system is more established in a general way. The terms cannot be learned unless the overall language system itself in each nurse is strong. It’s like trying to put cargo on an unfinished boat – it will sink. It’s like building a stadium for a soccer game but forgetting to put in the field. The nurses will only learn the vocabulary they need when the field – the language in a general way, is finished.
In NTCI it is less about collecting funny details, and more about getting the group together to showcase each child. Because of the community building that is done in NTCI classes before even trying stories, shy students become automatically more engaged. Thus, NTCI classes don’t revolve around the five to seven most talkative kids in class.
In NTCI teachers don’t have to instruct in a certain way. The message in their training is not that if they don’t do what they are told at a conference, they will fail. We are all different individuals with different teaching personalities. Diversity in instructional strategies, choosing what strategies we resonate most with, is a strength of NTCI. There is no one way to teach a language. What is required is that we simply be ourselves, which is not so easy for some teachers, who are constantly on guard and feeling (rightly) judged.
In NTCI we downplay summative assessments. If we are forced to give them, we weigh them lightly and we make them easy. We don’t give summative tests on specific vocabulary to see if it was “learned”.
In NTCI, we don’t kill motivation in kids by unfairly asking for translations of certain words that we think they “should have” learned, because doing so provides false results about what has been acquired, since what has been acquired lies hidden in the unconscious mind. Why do we keep ignoring the findings of the research?
Students in NTCI classes should experience very low levels of conscious engagement when reading. They should be allowed to read easy texts that some might say are below their ability but in my view are just right. We read “down”, which means we always read texts that are simple enough so as not to engage the conscious faculty of the student. Challenging readings are suspect in NTCI classes, because they engage the conscious faculty in the erroneous activity of analysis, which is a function of the conscious mind and therefore not welcome in language instruction as per the research.
In the upper levels of NTCI classes, we do not ask students to do expository writing. They can write in college. Why? It is because their students will have had so much listening and reading input in secondary school that they will be able to write effortlessly, in an unforced way.
I don’t like the use of the term “There is…” to start every story. It gets tiresome. What if the students don’t want to be told in each and every class that there is a girl or a boy? Perhaps they would rather decide, via the NTCI/Ultimate CI process of working from images, what “there is” by designing their own image-based classroom experiences themselves.
The research – fifty years of it – fairly screams that our only job in a language classroom is to deliver CI. That’s it.
NTCI has the ability to reverse expected outcomes in language classes for many “ordinary” kids. Installing any kind of CI curriculum in a language classroom should be done with the concept of equity in mind. NTCI can bring equity into a language classroom where other approaches cannot. If everyone can learn a first language, then everyone can learn a second and third and fourth language.
In NTCI, timers are not used. That is because the student who times doesn’t hear a word. I know that TPRS teachers like to make class competitions on who stayed in the TL longest that week, but the loss of five students, one from each class, is unacceptable.)
NTCI doesn’t insist that we “teach to their eyes” – it is too intense for some kids and they avert their eyes.
NTCI doesn’t require that kids interrupt us with some sort of signal (“over my head” or “stop” hand signals). Most kids have not developed that kind of personal power and awareness yet in their young lives, given where they’ve been (in school buildings which teach subservience) for so many years. It’s no wonder they look to their phones so much – they have power over them.
NTCI doesn’t check for comprehension with “ten-finger” or “thumbs up/thumbs down” signals. They don’t work because the kids, always fearing ridicule anyway, never tell the truth with those kinds of comprehension checks. Then how to check for comprehension? With NTCI it is more intuitive, we use the Three Modes of Communication in the assessment process, and we also give more frequent and very easy quizzes. Being graded in those two ways brings confidence.
NTCI is far less stressful. NTCI teachers report that with non-targeted CI, their stress levels drop. Here is an example: “Your books provide an instructional routine that I can count on to get me through a class period, but with much lower stress levels than before…”. (Lillian Smith)
In NTCI we don’t require students to say “Ohhh!” after everything we say, for two reasons: (1) it’s kind of demeaning, making them react like animals, and (2) the real reason is that kids lie in order to not draw attention to themselves. Why make them say “Ohhh!” after something we say in class when half of them didn’t understand us?
One teacher has said: “I am coming more and more over to Ben’s perspective, that I don’t need to target structures or vocabulary, because if I allow the students to make the conversation continually more interesting, all that stuff is going to show up. Best part of all – ALL the kids are following along and learning, not just the rock star kids who ace every class.” My comment on that is that this reflects Krashen’s admonition in 2008 or 2009 to the TPRS community, which had begun targeting at a high level by then (vs. Blaine’s original non-targeted vision that was purely based on Krashen’s research in the early 1990s), to tone down the targeting lest there be a “constraint on interest” (Krashen’s term).
Nobody listened to Krashen about non-targeted input constraining interest. (He didn’t push the point enough in 2008 in my view) and the result now years later are classes of regular kids not being able to keep up and the rock stars that the teacher refers to above dominating, thus splitting the class and with that destroying the sense of community that was so delicately built up since the beginning of the year.
The main thing is that non-targeted just feels right. But most CI teachers aren’t able to break the shackles of existing, list-governed curriculums, and so what is natural doesn’t feel right to them.
Teachers don’t reflect deeply enough that their curriculums conflict 100% with the research. And all so that their students can – via CI – “learn” certain words in a forced way in a certain month for a test vs. letting it all happen naturally.
When you use non-targeted CI, the kids will acquire the words ANYWAY, just at a different pace, maybe not when you and your departmental colleagues want them to for the test, but when their brains want to. This is in keeping with Krashen’s Natural Order of Acquisition Hypothesis.
When you allow your students to learn something when they want to in a natural way, as per the Natural Order of Acquisition hypothesis, the acquisition will be much deeper. Why not do that? If kids are not having fun, then the prime ingredient for success in a CI classroom is missing.
Why bore students by teaching them the colors one word at a time when we all know that in languages such words don’t exist in isolation from other words? Contextual richness is needed.
Why talk to the kids in stilted fashion by trying to insert the words that we “need for them to learn” when we can instead invite them to enjoy a much freer lesson that is divorced from any planned outcome? Is it not true that any satisfying conversation is unpredictable?
When we “target” words in our language instruction, we reduce the scope and interest of our teaching [Krashen]. The students feel our need for them to learn certain words and it hurts everything because it “feels like school”.