As teachers, we don't often have the opportunity to sit in CI classrooms as students where the language being taught is one we don't understand. Even when we do have the opportunity, we frequently are watching the teacher's techniques or the students' reactions, rather than learning the language for ourselves. We are 'four percenters' - the people who want to drive the car and know how it works, so we function okay in a 'normal' language classroom.
But today I have the opportunity to sit in a CI classroom, and I'm learning French. It's been about six years since I've heard any French, so this is nice. I'm getting to say things in French again, and I'm getting to immerse myself. I'm surprised by, when the teacher's doing a good job, how easy it is to understand what's going on, but I'm having difficulty separating that from the fact that I already have a little French. Nevertheless, she's good at repeating herself, asking us to repeat ourselves, and demonstrating things. We're also demonstrating things, which I would find kitschy if I weren't finding that it also sticks in your memory a lot better. I've been incorporating this into my classroom for the last couple years with mixed results. Turns out that even with gestures, if you don't reinforce them, they don't become a thing. If you do, the following happens:
you're giving a performance final, and you're listening to Brian P describing a picture to his friend, who's supposed to be drawing it. Brian wants to tell his friend that the sky is blue. As an aside, at the beginning of the year, we signed blue and green a lot because I had a blue cup and a green cup, and we needed those words to differentiate between my cups. It's now May.
Brian hits the word blue, for whatever reason can't pull it out of his head, and I watched him gesture, almost unconsciously, blue to himself, and the friend drawing grabbed a blue marker a split second before Brian actually said caeruleum.
Gesture is powerful. It's a thing. It's huge. It connects a word to an image in our minds, and to be able to honestly comprehend when reading or listening, we have to be able to have a movie running in our minds. Without any images, that doesn't happen. I have an image for angry, but I need one for iratus, also, or the movie will hit interference, and I will stop understanding. The film will skip, and I will get lost trying to catch back up. Gesture grounds ideas.
That said.
I've been asking for English more from my kids recently, with mixed results. Some apparently appreciate the no-pressure-refresher in English; others feel like it's cheating. I think some words need it more than others. I thought we understood festinare (to hurry), but evidently several kids didn't get it. That may be one that I need to tell them so we can differentiate it from running and going. My IIs and I managed to get through all kinds of emotions (including doubt and shame) with close to no English this year, just by making faces and giving situations. It took longer, it's true, but they made connections, and they had places to use their new words, and they heard them a lot, and they heard more language, I think. Deeper, not broader. And we're forever trying to go deeper, not broader.
I'm not getting to make any connections here. I think the English is giving us an excuse (because it's so easy for us to grab and then look at the board for a No Pressure Refresher) to just add more words, which I neither want nor need right now. As much as I think that language learning should be simple, should be relatively painless (if exhausting), sometimes I think a thing should be gestured, should be drawn, should be demonstrated, and should only be glossed if the kids indicate that they need that.
I don't know. I'm conflicted on this issue - I think there are arguments for either side. Establishing meaning is the biggest thing here. What do you think?
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