General Thoughts on CI - 4

It is our mind that makes the language comprehensible to our kids, but it is our heart that makes it meaningful to them.

We often fail to try to understand what our students perceive and experience in our classes. We focus instead on our own perception of our teaching, which is influenced by how we were taught, which was not effective because it was all based on thinking and the mind. Those were the old days.

To make any narrative method work, we must communicate with our students in the target language, sharing interesting messages and getting them focused on the message and not on the vehicle used to deliver them: the mind.

We communicate with our students in the target language, of course, via comprehensible input, which is how people acquire languages. This helps us open our hearts to our students.

Some of us actually enjoy our jobs because when our hearts are open to our students, good things happen. We begin to know and appreicate the tremendous cyclonic power there is in creating language out of as little as a single word in class just because it’s fun and because - during this period of transition in our society - laughter in WL classes is about as scarce as hens’ teeth.

Doing it that way, expanding one word of a language into an image or a tableau or even a story, leads to real communication vs. memorizing a list of words for a test. Real communication through CI provides a pathway towards fluency; memorizing individual words leads to boredom, low enrollments, low confidence, and empty promises to our clientele. Real communication uplifts children, but memorization makes them - ALL OF THEM - think that they are bad at languages*.

The fact is that we are here to teach the language, and not mere words.

*this happens when someone asks them to say something in the TL after four years of study and they can’t.