Yesterday I found an article that wasn’t about CI, because it was written on the general topic of education and not on world language teaching. But it spoke to me because I saw discussed in it the same vital elements that will bring about the change in WL education – compassion and inclusion.
The heart of CI, in my opinion, lies in the word compassion. I tired talking to Krashen about it once and he didn’t want to “go there”. That’s fine. He did the research and we are grateful to him. He’s not a classroom teacher anyway.
The one big thing that he showed via his 30+ years of research is that kids in language classrooms should be allowed to be themselves and relax and not stress in the same way that they do in other classrooms. All they should have to do is listen for the first year.
There should be no comparing. I’ve gone on and on – with no apologies – about that here for fifteen years, trying to do what I can to bring love and compassion into our own field as the major players, and not grades and all that superficial stuff that really doesn’t help in our particular field of language instruction.
Here is a link to that general article that I mentioned above. It is just one of a deluge of articles out there that all point essentially to the same thing – to compassion and community building in the language classroom, just like we are doing with the Invisibles:
So if you have access to an audience, write an article. Talk about the change. Use the primer articles above, use anything from this site. Find stuff. Share. Write. Be the change. The kids need for us to do that right now.