Anyone watching World Cup action these days (I’m watching France and Belgium right now) has seen a variety of soccer styles from the best players on the best national teams in the world.
In soccer – or as we will be calling it after the demise of the NFL in the next thirty years, football – there are what are called “set pieces”. These are where the team “rehearses” plays that they think might work, for example on a penalty kick when a player kicks the ball towards lanes in front of the goal in a planned way that other players try to fill to reach a certain spot in front of the goal when it is kicked specifically to their area so that they can use their heads to head the ball into the back of the net. We could compare such planned play to targeted language instruction in comprehensible input classes (TPRS).
However, they cannot really control where the ball goes. So also, we cannot control where the language will go in a language class, where the conversation will lead. It would be too bad if we did. And we have been. And it hasn’t worked. It is like the soccer players trying to plan out every pass in the game beforehand.
The South American teams, especially Brazil and Uruguay and the great side from Colombia led in the heart-and-soul department by the great Colombian Diego Ojeda, do not play like this. It is said that they would rather not score a goal unless it is “beautiful”. One cannot “plan” a language class anymore than one can plan where the ball will go in a soccer game. We want beauty. When whimsy and creative play are there, beauty is there and it is worth doing and (no surprise) this kind of play in the language classroom brings by far the biggest gains.
So when an unplanned (non-targeted) CI program is put into place in a school, where proven activities like One Word Images and the creation of stories with invisible characters, and the Invisibles Star Sequence in general with all of its fine activities are there, structure is provided for each class to allow the unexpected to happen within a structure that does not strangle the class. This provides the students with the whimsy and predictability and confidence that the they need. Like in soccer, there is enough structure to allow for beauty.
In soccer, when the team is closing in on the other team’s goal like a vice grip but nobody, not even the players, knows what will happen next. They are just trying to keep the ball in play and direct it to the goal, and that is when wonderful goals can happen.
As a product of whimsy.
Normal speech is not forced and nor should our speech be forced in our classrooms.
I would rather play the game of teaching my students without set pieces, without targets from some list somewhere, without having to read some specific book that everyone has to read together at the same pace, which creates winners and losers. I would rather find out what is going to happen on the field when I arrive in my classroom that day, and have it be different in every class but with the same massive gains at the end of the year guaranteed in each class. I wouldn’t want to have the game all played out in my mind in a mechanical way five times a day when I go to work each day, that’s for sure. Did that for 25 years and cried silently through every long, thankless and futile day, serving only the elite.
When we play, my players, my students, show confidence. And they know their jobs on the field. And they know that anything can happen. And that’s when it gets fun. In the non-targeted way. Non-targeted language instruction aligns best with the research, and so it hits the mark. Why hasn’t Krashen said this yet? Hmmmm….