Bob Patrick asked, “What is CI?” I honestly think that teaching using comprehensible input – that term in lower case – is what Curtain and Met and all the other people who have jumped on the bandwagon mean when they use the term. They say it to get credibility, not because they embrace it fully. It is something that they get in a broad sense and that is all. But since it is a buzz word now they use it, but wrongly. They are misleading a lot of teachers into thinking that their (watered down) version of CI is ok to use and if they use it as sold by Curtain and them they could maybe even continue to use the textbook and do this bogus form of ci at the same time. There is a lot of pride in that stance, not to mention intellectual hubris and not a small degree of disdain, born of ego, of Krashen. Why don’t they get it? They don’t get the unconscious piece, its supreme role in language acquisition.
Krashen’s specific and more precise original intent has, on the other hand, taken flight in the term TCI, an umbrella term to TPRS that will revive and replace it and which conveys the real meaning that Krashen intended – full input for years with the attention of the learner on the meaning and not on the words as well as no forced output until the massive amount of input starts showing up in writing and speech naturally over time, all of it being an unconscious process that reflects the way we learn our first language.
That is what we try to create in our classrooms – real CI. Real CI in my view is adherence, strictly, to the 90% statement and the Interpersonal Skill and the Three Modes and all of that that we have talked about in such detail here on the PLC over the past three or four months. So that is the difference in my view between ci and CI.
And Bob my own formal definition would take me some time to craft. It’s just about all I’ve thought about all these years, especially the part about language acquisition being an unconscious process. I have written so much on that one aspect of real CI, even creating a category for it if anyone wants to go read some of those posts.
Because it is the fact that the unconscious focus on the meaningthat really leads to actual acquisition that the Curtains and those others just don’t get. It’s like what I have said here a few times about Krashen being like Jung.
Jung wanted to take depth psychology away from the analytical schools of the day and away from Freud, but, when he “went there” he took the science into a realm of the immeasurable, unquantifiable and undefinable, and thus become persona non grata in the field.
I think that this is what happened to Krashen – he rightly pulled his field into the direction of the deeper mind, where language acquisition really occurs but cannot be controlled or quantified as a definable process and trapped in a book or computer program, and, ever since, has been judged by people who want to pull his work back into a safe area of the measurable for them, and the result is Realidades.
Really Bob that is my answer to the question of what CI is, it’s the unconscious piece.
For more on Jung and the role of the unconscious, which defines CI for me: https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/01/21/language-learning-is-an-unconscious-process/