teachers who taught communicative methods had to prepare their kids for input-method classrooms at the upper levels?
Would they be concerned with cramming fluency into their kids the last month of the school year because they anticipated the input-method teachers complaining vocally that the kids weren’t ready to succeed in input-method classrooms?
Would they sacrifice their focus on grammatical forms to do that, even though they knew that spending time getting kids ready for the next level where things were done completely backwards to how they were done at that level was only taking away from the kids’ achievement at the level they’re in?
Would they be continually in a state of uproar, even though they knew they were teaching the best way they knew how, always fearing what the input-method teachers were saying about their teaching?
Would there be summative assessments given before the end of a course (aka “midterms”) that required fluency in the language, testing what the input-method-taught classes would have done in that time, instead of mistimed summative assessments testing discrete points and thematic units? Would they feel such assessments effectively disallowed their communicative instructional methods, as current midterms essentially disallow input-based methods?
We’ll probably never know, of course. But I’d love to meet the communicative-method teacher who worried about it.
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