Pringle Man - 1
An Early OWI...
Ten years ago, I was teaching French at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India and managed to get on videotape five videos of an early one word image. The link to the first video is at the end of this article.
If you have attended any of my Saturday CI trainings over the years, you will see how these videos prefigured what we are doing now in our weekend study of the new Triangle book.
Things to look for in the videos:
A flowing, developing narrative about a Pringle with lots of back and forth, participatory language being created via the normal questioning process that we have all come to know is the backbone of CI teaching.
Engaged kids who - as per the research - are focused on the message and not the language being used to deliver it.
In three of the videos, which will be posted over the next few months here on Substack, we take a look at reading. Of course - now years later - the reading videos have evolved into the powerful set of reading activities that currently comprise Phase 4 of the Star 1 book.
In the video below, we see an enjoyable thread of constant speech input in the TL in the form of lighthearted and laughter-filled co-creativity that puts the students at the center of things.
This wasn’t a planned class. I didn’t plan anything. It never would have worked if I had done that, if I had tried to use CI to teach specific words other than those that emerged naturally in class. It wouldn’t have worked if I had had any other agenda than what the real curriculum of any language class should always be: the language itself and not little parts and pieces of it.
The class wouldn’t have worked if I had insulted the research by using CI to teach some ill-fitting semantic set list of words to placate someone at the district or building level who was ignorant (no blame!) of the research and yet was trying to tell me how to teach.
Targeting vocabulary is not a good idea, and yet many language teachers seem to still be doing it even now.
Why is it a dumb idea to plan a class/ target vocabulary from a list? Because according to the premier language education researcher of the past fifty years, Stephen Krashen, targeting vocabulary puts a constraint on interest, which is the last thing a CI teacher would ever want to happen in her classroom.
The video shows that we can be happy when we teach, that we can just enjoy the kids and how creative and funny they really are, if we would but allow it.
The video also reveals the beginnings of naturally-emerging speech in the students. Throughout the video, you can hear students mouthing/ forming/ whispering words after hearing them spoken in class. Listen carefully at 6:12 and you will hear a student next to the camera say the word “personne” (“nobody” in French) in what is exactly how Krashen defines how speech output forms in a new language: without force.
What you see in the video thus aligns with what the research says, that language acquisition is an unconscious process and therefore cannot be taught by any teacher via any form of forced output, and most especially through the onerous and supremely ugly pedagogical beast of memorization.
If somebody asked me what I do, I would not say that I am a language teacher, but a person who helps kids understand messages in another language.
We can’t “teach” a language, and those who try are foolish beyond words and will never make it through a full career without major collateral damage from endless waves of bored kids each year, kids hiding their mirth and potential laughter until their teachers learn how to bring those things out of them.
We can’t teach a language because people have to be out of their minds to even try to learn a language, centered perhaps more in their bodies or hearts, but certainly not in the thinking part of their psyche, as fifty years of intense research by intellectual giants like Krashen, Chomsky and Mason have shown.
The backstory on the video is that a student came into class early, picked up a small whiteboard, sat down and drew the image while waiting for class to start, then handed it to me at the start of class and I immediately went with it because I found it to be more interesting than the class I had planned.
*My favorite quote on this topic is from Noam Chomsky, who said: ““...[language] is acquired by virtually everyone, effortlessly...merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure, and care...”.
These are 7th graders in level 1 in February: