What about rigor? Some language teachers say that teaching using comprehensible input is too “easy” for the students and so they succeed too much, earning “too many” A’s. The answer to that question is that teaching with comprehensible input definitely seems easy to students and is certainly different from most of their classes.
But the master German teacher Robert Harrell in Los Angeles has said that we need to distinguish between true rigor vs. rigor as work that is “onerous” or “burdensome”. Harrell asks if doing more worksheets and thinking about the language in class is actually rigorous or just means more work. He asks if 40 math problems that practice the same concept is twice as rigorous as 20, or just more work.
According to the US Department of State, rigor includes a “sustained focus, depth and integrity of inquiry, suspension of premature conclusions, and a continual testing of hypotheses”. Students in a CI classroom are exposed to this healthy kind of rigor, not the onerous kind.
The Interpersonal Mode of Communication, the central driving force of ACTFL’s Three Modes of Communication, requires students to maintain a sustained focus on the meaning of what is being said with no zoning out and side conversations. Grammar is not brought into that formula. The teaching of grammar as a pedagogical concept is not mentioned in ACTFL’s pages.
Rigor is about focusing on the language’s meaning, not on how it is built.
So, let’s go back to the State Department’s definition of rigor. Anyone who has seen a trained CI teacher in action in their classroom has witnessed “sustained focus” in the students.
Moreover, in a CI classroom we can see the “continual testing of hypotheses” of the State Department’s definition of Rigor, but in a clever twist the students are not even aware that they are doing that, because that continual testing is occurring at an unconscious level in the students’ minds during class. In truth, what is happening is far too complex for the students’ conscious minds to grasp and can only happen in the deeper mind, which is the only part of the brain that is properly wired for that kind of heavy lifting.
What about the “suspension of premature conclusions” in the students’ minds during class in terms of our new definition of Rigor? As students are exposed to the language in a contextualized, meaningful fashion, they suspend conclusions about how the language functions rather than having those conclusions grammatically forced upon them at the outset. The conclusions are all tested and drawn during sleep, in fact.
At some point certain students do become interested in the grammar. But such instruction about the mechanical aspects of the language, how it “works”, is best done when the questions arise, which is usually not before level 3. The unconscious brain is continuously testing the students’ hypotheses about what sounds correct in the language, and it is during this unconscious process that the language system is built. We know that this is true because this is what happens with very small children just as the research shows that it happens.
