My son just started taking Spanish in his middle school.  He came home one day recently, telling be they were learning “verbs” first.  What the teacher was doing was having them memorize a bunch of “basic” verbs from lists.  The students in the class evidently were then set to practice “using” the verbs in this form:

¿Te gusta ________?

Sí, me gusta ________.  Or:  No, no me gusta ________.

How does this go against the precepts of Teaching through Comprehensible Input (TCI)?  Let me count the ways.

First, there seems to have been little focus on input at all.  The teacher maybe pronounced the words for them once or twice each, maybe using them in context a little bit, but the focus was to get the students making up sentences with each other as soon as possible.  But TCI maintains, through long-established and well-tested theory, that we acquire a language by hearing it (input) and understanding what we hear (comprehensible).  Now, if the teacher was giving them good examples of these bits of language, and the students were paying attention, then that was CI.  If the kids in the class were making sentences up for their partners, and their partners were understanding what they heard, then that is CI.  The problem lies with the quality of the input.  A seventh-grader on her first day of Spanish class will not be able to pronounce Spanish words or sentences very well at all.  When she speaks a sentence for her partner to understand, it will not be excellent quality Spanish.  The partner will acquire far-from-perfect Spanish.  He will in turn provide her, and his other classmates, with bad input.  This will result in a vicious circle, the end results of which are what is sometimes referred to as “classroom pidgin.”  If we have novice students teach each other the language, they will acquire a novice language.

Second, the pattern was a poor choice for the particular language involved.  This structure was chosen because it could be made into a simple plug-in exercise for repetition of the “basic” verb form.  (All the blanks above can be filled in by the infinitives of the verbs in the list.)  Now, asking about likes and dislikes is certainly a basic function of language, and one that is inherently interesting; however, in Spanish, the “me gusta, te gusta” sentence pattern is not normal for simple declarative sentences.  It is not the English “I like, you like” but rather “to me (it) is pleasing, to you (it) is pleasing.”  A teacher wanting to get her students to acquire basic Spanish patterns is setting herself up for some serious headaches by focusing on this oddball right away.  Students will naturally start using it for different kinds of sentences, producing things like, “Me esta en la casa” or “Te bebe agua.”   It seems to me that it would be far better to start with “Do you watch TV?  Do you play football?” and so on, more basic and inherently interesting questions that use a far more common grammatical structure.  Introduce “me gusta” later, gradually, so it can fit in “on top” of more common structures.

Third, why give students huge lists of words to memorize?  They won’t use most of them very much.  They will remember enough of them to get a good grade on the quiz next Wednesday, but the rest will go spinning off into the stratosphere, never to be heard again.  We TCI teachers feel it is much more important to focus on a few words at a time, chosen by the students because they are interesting to the students, and to use these words constantly to make up lots of different sentences (see point four below), the teacher using his expert knowledge of the language to provide input that is high quality.

Finally – and I surely could think up more things to say, but you’re getting impatient with me – what’s so fun about using and re-using the same pattern, with no real connection to one’s feelings or to natural meaning in the world?  I can see the students in their class, sitting next to their partners (or across from each other, because the teacher will get brownie points from her supervisor for rearranging the chairs), paper in hand, having this kind of dialog:

Student 1:  “Te gusta comer” (flat, monotonic voice)

Student 2:  “Wait, what’s kow-mair?”

Student 1:  (points to word on list) “It means eat.”

Student 2:  “Oh, yeah.  Um … me gusta … si, me gusta comer.  Um … te gusta Bieber”

Student 1:  “it’s not ‘Bieber’ like Justin Bieber, dummy.  Bay-BARE.”

Student 2:  “Whatever.  I heard Hayley and Josh are going out now.”

Etc….

A TCI class would be more like this:

Teacher:  Hey everybody, does Erin like to drink coffee?

Class:  Yes! No! No! Yes!

Teacher:  Some of you said that Erin likes to drink coffee, some of you said that Erin doesn’t like to drink coffee.  Well, she doesn’t like to drink coffee.  She told me she doesn’t like to drink coffee.  What does Erin like to drink?

Brave student:  Whiskey!

Teacher:  Yes, that’s true!  Erin likes to drink whiskey. Erin drinks whiskey every day.  Does Erin drink whiskey on Thursday?

Class:  Of course!

Another brave student:  How do you say, “A lot?”

Etc….

Where would you rather be?

Chris Lonsdale explains in this short video some of the principles he has used to learn languages quickly and efficiently.  Much of what he says lines up with Comprehensible Input methodology.

In the future, America will have to rescue its education system to maintain competitiveness in the global marketplace.  Thank goodness we are already heading down that road.  Here is what education will look like in the decades to come.

In the future, American schooling will be so much more efficient that it will be almost unrecognizable to earthlings of today.  Online/distance learning will be incorporated with the latest advances in medical technology and edumetrics to produce the most well-oiled workforce in the world.  Let’s take a little look into the classroom of the mid-21st century, shall we?

Each day, at 7:00am, uniformed students will arrive at the school, most likely in their parents’ SUVs.  Passing through the AIT machine at the front door, their personal identification implant will be read automatically.  Daily tuition voucher money will be transferred directly and instantly from the government treasury to the child’s account at Education, Inc.  Excess tuition not covered by vouchers will be automatically added to the student’s tuition mortgage account.  At the same time, the student’s daily medication package will be prepared by the pharmacy robot, dosages calculated by continuous behavioral observations and biometric sensors in the child’s learning station.  Guards will ensure that this package is swallowed before students are allowed to proceed to their Learning Reception Centers.

All students will have assigned Learning Reception Centers based on projections made from test scores during the previous weeks.  They will be separated based on previous performance, scores on aptitude tests, genetic background information, and sex.  They will be prevented from entering improper Learning Reception Centers by their personal identification implant.  In each Learning Reception Center the child will have its assigned Learning Station, which will consist of a chair bolted to the floor to prevent movement which may interfere with data collection.  In front of the chair will be a large, newly-updated Mango® tablet computer with which the student will enter all test question answers for instantaneous data collection and analysis, done by the US Department of Education Central supercomputers, located two miles underground outside of Kearney, Nebraska, where it will be safe from nuclear threats posed by America’s competitor nations (China, India, Brazil, Finland, etc.).  Next to the tablet will be a rewards dispenser.  Students of the future will not need breaks for meals, as they will be distributed sufficient calories in pleasant candy rewards throughout the day, or, conversely, they will be motivated by hunger if their performance slows down.  Since the chairs will have dual function as toilets, not a single second will be wasted during the school day.

In the future, nobody will complain about unequal opportunities in education, since the schools will be completely standardized throughout the country.  The curriculum will be mostly STEM but will include lessons on citizenship:  patriotism and the proper responsibilities of workers to their employers.  Even the teaching will be completely standardized, as all teachers will broadcast out of US Department of Education Central.  Only a handful of teachers will be needed for each subject this way, so teacher selection will be vastly superior to today’s method:  candidates will go through a rigorous selection process much like that used to recruit astronauts today.  And these elite teachers will be replaced every three years or so to keep the team young and in top form.

At 5:00 in the evening, while parents are waiting in their monster trucks to pick their children up and take them to evening classes, they will be able to read instantaneous report cards about their children for the day which will help them guide their young ones to the proper homework assignments that have been custom-tailored for each individual student to do on their Mango® home tablet computers in the hours before bedtime.