There is an urgent need for better ways to teach students to listen. While we all know that listening is one of the four focal skills, in my own opinion it is both the most essential and the most neglected. Teachers who privilege Comprehensible Input know that students have to be either listening or reading
“Don’t think of it as a friendship. Think of it as a partnership. You need a brain and I need legs.”
“Then the boys meet the gang again and there’s an exciting chase scene during which Kevin becomes Max’s brain and Max becomes Kevin’s legs. It’s one of the best scenes in the film.”
Grammar is only relevant when it gives us information about the characters and their situation.
There are scenes that could have been left out, the knights on horseback fail to capture the wonder of a boy’s imagination. They are just a bunch of men dressed up as knights. But the story comes across, we know that Max and Kevin are seeing real knights, and the magic works every time. It has become an indispensable tool in my teacher’s kit.
You may have found a great video but when you put it on, your students complain that the speakers don’t articulate, they speak too fast and their accents are frightful! It’s gibberish to them.
So, my advice to colleagues who feel torn between teaching with Comprehensible Input and teaching grammar is to trust their wings, the wings of Acquisition, and jump off the roof.
Teachers intent on counting reps forgot that input must always be compelling. If your students’ eyes have glazed over, you may as well stop circling.
I am grateful to Beniko Mason Nanki for presenting teachers around the world with an elegant and easy to use a strategy that allows us to immerse our students in compelling comprehensible input.
We all know that magic tricks work because of the magician’s ability to focus our attention elsewhere. My students are focused on filling in the blanks, but actually my goal is to get them to listen to Comprehensible Input attentively and repeatedly.
Every summer for the last ten years something magic has happened in Agen, France. Teachers from around the world have gathered in a friendly little town in southwest France and particpated in what many of them have called a life-changing experience. They come together because they have heard of a different way of teaching languages, a way of creating stories with their students and building a different kind of classroom. They come with open hearts and open minds and they leave with smiles and warm memories and many new friends. That is the magic of Agen.