Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
We Don’t Have A Minute To Lose
Share:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Ben Slavic
Get The Latest Updates
Subscribe to Our Mailing List
No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.
Related Posts
CI and the Research (cont.)
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Research Question
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
We Have the Research
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
10 thoughts on “We Don’t Have A Minute To Lose”
Unfortunately, in schools there is often business that must be conducted – and to get it over with quickly it must be done in English. (How do I explain to level 1 students on day 12 that we’re having a fire drill in 5 minutes?) Also, a Foreign Language Annals article that I read indicated students processed the lesson (yes, grammar driven) better if it was preceded and followed by a brief statement of purpose/re-cap in the native language.
So, my goal for next year is to limit all English utterances to the first 5 minutes and last 2 minutes of class (plenty of time for school business). Yes, I lose 7 minutes per day that way, but 50 minutes of L2 is infinitely better than 57 minutes of L1.5. And I have to set the example. I have to be goal-oriented and get rid of absolutely everything that does not contribute to achieving the goal. I may even prepare a two-sided sign. One side will read “English is now permitted”; the other side, “Nur Deutsch wird gesprochen”.
Potential problem: what do I do about kids’ need to clarify meaning? what do I do for kids who are making grammar connections and need verification? Gotta work on that.
You’re right in the sense that the kids can get bent out of shape if their needs for clarification are not met. They like to take it personally. It is a potential problem. You have to decide whether you want to please that one kid, who could clarify things later, or whether you want to honor the fact that the neurology needs to be purely in L2 during those 50 minutes of class. I think it does. To me, peppering a class with English is like throwing a stick into the spokes of a moving bicycle, and I will continue, as you say so well here Robert
…to be goal-oriented and get rid of absolutely everything that does not contribute to achieving the goal.
Let’s be honest. When kids try to use L1 to clarify meaning in class, is some of that merely to draw attention to themselves? I think it is. When they do that, it means that I have not convinced them that I believe that their needs in my classroom are best served when I speak only in L2.
That may sound a little callous, but the social fabric of school, for teenagers, is more important to them than the academic fabric. If you are up there directing class and refusing to “go there” into L1, and if they suddenly need to hear their voice (lovely tho it is, it is in the wrong language), then they will pester you until you give in.
But if they really want to know, then they can hold their questions for after class. All those kids in my classes last year who had pressing questions and wanted to use L1 in the middle of a story for clarification last year strangely forgot their pressing question as soon as class was over.
I’m saying that, in most cases, the need for clarification is the need for a bit of control in what is admittedly a hard environment for a kid. The so called smart ones, especially, are not used to giving up control of the classroom to those teachers who allow that nonsense. It is all the more reason to go slowly and make sure that we make ourselves TOTALLY UNDERSTOOD in L2, so they aren’t tempted to challenge our power in the classroom.
You’re right about the control issue. Not too long ago I was talking to some graduates from the school where I teach. They were telling about things they and their friends had done in class. One story involved another student who made a male teacher cry. My comment, “I guess I was pretty fortunate then.” (I had this other student in class as well.) The reply, “Are you kidding? You wouldn’t have let him get away with it, and he knew it!” (I once called this student at home – with his mother’s permission – and told him to get out of bed and get to class.)
I want to go back to the 10,000 hours.
It looks as though if I am really teaching well, eight hours a day, it takes almost 7 years to learn (to do TPRS!), and that would mean the same thing for any other skill. (I know there’s someone who’s studied this.)
What do we say to our students? Obviously, 10,000 hours means that they have years ahead–as do we). Susie worked out with one of my students this summer that he was coming up on 3,000 hours of CI in Russian, and she said that was the tipping point for starting to speak a language.
I have been telling my kids that we need to learn the 300 highest frequency words and the structures that hold them together, and that after that, it’s up to them. What are the main talking points here though, and what do you tell your kids about time on task?
You’re right! By this theory, if you work a 9-5 job 40 hours a week you land around 2,080 hours. So it takes around 5 years to be a master at your job. Teachers, only have 36 weeks a year to practice this skill unless you also have summer language classes. This is fascinating.
Someone referenced the 10,000 hours theory on a sports blog I read on a regular basis. In the post he mentioned a book called the Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he cites studies that correlate 10,000 hours of practice and the emergence of elite musicians. At the same time, elite musician “naturals” who have practiced for less than 10,000 hours cannot be found. I haven’t read the book myself, but plan to before the end of summer vacation.
This is very exciting to me. I constantly stress to my students that class time is precious and cannot be wasted. I also try to give them an idea what it takes to become fluent in a second language. Now, I can give them a concrete number. It would be interesting if my students tracked the number of hours practicing Spanish during and after highschool to see if the 10,000 hour theory holds true.
As department chair, this gives me more amunition to further reform the language program where I work. At the end of last year we adopted the ACTFL Performance Guidelines and came up with minimum percentages of comprehensible target language usage beginning with 85% in Spanish I and increasing by 5% in each subsequent level.
The message is that every second of classtime needs to be devoted to practicing the language, not talking about the language. I am lucky to have a principal and president that are reform minded and 100% supportive of TPRS.
Michele we accept the limitations of being in schools. Even if we use every minute all year, we give little input in terms of the 10,000 hours. I don’t know if there is any answer to the question other than your own answer:
I have been telling my kids that we need to learn the 300 highest frequency words and the structures that hold them together, and that after that, it’s up to them.
I have a question back at you. All of the talk about focusing on the highest frequency words and delivering them in a planned way to our kids has always made me uncomfortable, just because, to me a) language is really so spontaneous and neurologically random that the brain will locate and learn those 300 anyway, and a lot more, as long we just talk to them in L2, and b) I am a hippy like that anyway. My question to you or anyone who has studied this “learning of certain words from word frequency lists” process, is whether there has been research that shows that focusing on certain words actually produces superior acquisition to those who, like me, just do random hippy CI.
Yes, I do use word lists, but that is because my district told me to learn those specific words at level 1 as part of my job. At levels past level 1, I grok that any required per level words taken from any word lists would be used and learned naturally in any properly run TPRS class, to the tune of level 2 kids learning all sorts of level 3 and 4 words. If you apply Krashen’s work on reading to auditory CI, it just makes sense. They hear it a lot, they read it a lot, and they learn it. Not much educationese there, but hey, we are at the end of education as we knew it anyway. Stories blaze vocabulary into their minds – it is a bodacious process, far above any lists of anything.
As you said, the first 300 words are the ones that come up the most often in stories. All you have to do is start talking with your kids. Whatever gets repeated a lot is on that list. And the structures are the ones that you need all the time.
You have already said that better in many other ways. I don’t necessarily think we have to have a specific list to hand anyone–but I think most of the words are in Poor Anna and any of the stories we write for our kids. And I think that I could carefully create a list and tell stilted stories from that, or I could do what looks like being a hippy, and the same words would come up anyway. But it’s a nice round number to tell kids in first year!
Yes, Orlando, it was The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The 10,000 hour rule. Great book.
My brother Rich and I were taking a walk the week we both retired a few years ago. We both at that point had spent 38 years in education (but then I went to Delhi for more punishment), started the same week and finished the same week. On this walk in the foothills of the Rockies, we tried to deconstruct our careers. The one thing we both agreed on is that pedagogy (he taught cello at the Univ. of Denver) was nowhere near as important as time spent playing the instrument, or in my case time spent listening and reading the language. Other factors had little impact. Of course that is Gladwell’s point. But – to Michele’s point above although it is ten years old – in terms of what we tell our kids about time on task in my opinion should be that in language you listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and listen and read and …you get the idea. The big, actually egregious problem is the one addressed above, that we as inStructors WILL NEVER HAVE EVEN A FRACTION OF TIME NEEDED SO WHY DO WE TRY? WE CAN ONLY GET THEM INTERESTED IN BEING LIFE-LONG LEARNERS OF THE LANGUAGE. Why do people choose certain professions? Because they enjoy it and were given the message in school that they are good at it. Oops! That’s not something WL teachers do very often, is it? They tell kids where they are wrong, not where they are right. No wonder there is a critical shortage of language teachers!