CI Training, Tips, and Strategies, including TPRS® and other Krashen Based Methods

I apologize for not being more “on it” this summer. Actually I don’t, but there have been a few emails not responded to and I apologize for that. Now, here is one from a month ago that I just love. It is from Michele, who really gets CI if anybody does, wondering how to handle a parent who has decided that she knows more than Michele, and, by extension, Krashen. Hmmm. I wonder if this parent would trust herself to fill a cavity in her daughter’s tooth as well! Here are Michele’s musings, which make for some light summer reading, file it under “Joke of the Day”:

Ben,

I have had two run-ins with the same mom this summer. Her daughter is a less-than-thrilled member of my future Russian 3 class. She evidently does not like telling stories. She wants classwork to be “real.” Last year the mom said that I needed to vary the curriculum (she wanted grammar lessons at least once a week). We did vary the input–we went into our historical/cultural studies, but we still told stories to acquire the vocabulary. Mom is now arguing that I need to do hands-on, project work. She says that they need output, and she thinks it could be like the artwork that her daughter did in elementary Spanish immersion. She says I’m appealing too much to one kind of learning style with all the verbal input. I am listening, because I always do, though nowadays I know a lot more than she does about language teaching. Her daughter resists being an actor, and she resists doing gestures–which are limited at best as we move up levels. I don’t give much homework, other than assigning things like finding songs. I am trying really hard right now to justify or to tell my side–I think it would be really great if I could figure out a way to tweak my teaching so that I reach this set of kids.

My response: Michele, you don’t need to reach this kind of student. They are wrong. They are part of a bill of goods sold to the American public long ago that is bogus and totally false. The ideas of the mother (we can’t blame the daughter) are so off base that you need not even dignify this with a response. I know that there exist schools where even administrators still think this way, and some college methods courses still advocate the idiocy expressed above. But let’s keep in mind that that stuff is just dust in the wind now, as Blaine and Krashen and all the rest have exposed such thinking for what it is - wrong and false.

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I got this from Brian recently:

Hi, Ben,

This is in response to Laura Goley’s plea for advice on the moretprs list after her students got low scores on the AP Spanish exam:

Point #1: Language acquisition, for first and second languages, is basically and predominantly an unconscious process.

Point #2: The AP language tests, at least for Spanish and French, favor four percenters, those who are good at left-brained, conscious language learning. They may do well on the test without necessarily having acquired the language in a deep and lasting sense, nor even be on their way to such acquisition. By this I mean acquisition in the sense of unconscious absorption of the language as opposed to consciously learning to manipulate language rules.

Point #3: A test should align or be compatible with the methods used by the teacher and learners to reach the stated goal, in our case acquisition of a second language, and not the other way around. That is, what goes on in the classroom should not be determined by the form and methodology of the test. If there’s a bad match between the test and the classroom approach and methods, it’s the test that should be questioned.

Point #4: The results of districts, administrators, and teachers buying into AP classes for second languages are several: most importantly, 95% of kids, the ones who need to learn a language through comprehensible input, unconscious, low affective filter methods, don’t succeed in learning a second language. They are children who are perfectly capable of learning a second language - just not by means of the program dictated by the College Board for the AP test. Those kids and their teachers become frustrated and demoralized because they measure themselves according to an unrealistic, left-brained yardstick. Demoralized? Haunted with a sense of failure expresses it more accurately. That is the result on a personal level. On a national level our country doesn’t increase its number of citizens who can speak a language in addition to English, and we remain a monolingual nation, to our detriment.

Point #5: Follow the money. What are the economics of AP language tests? First, students making certain scores are allowed to skip certain levels of college level language courses. In reality, this means that they may start taking the same language at a more advanced level than 101, 102, 201, or 202—or they may simply skip taking a foreign language in college, thus saving the cost of 6, 8, 12, 16 or more undergraduate hours. I have no statistics on how many do which, but the question must be asked: Is a student deciding not to take any more 2nd language classes after they get to college consistent with our goals of getting more Americans who can speak at least one other language well? The company that produces and sells AP language tests makes money on that plus all the study materials and the expensive workshops offered to AP teachers. In other words, AP testing is a business - a big, lucrative business. Administrators look good when many kids take AP tests, and especially when the kids do well - regardless of whether or not they have acquired the language. As long as there are a few fours and fives in the group, most administrators can sell that to their bosses. But should administrators be purveyors for the AP testing company? Should administrators be procurers, or that other word that starts with p, providing the company with kids who pay to take the AP tests and with teachers who, for the sake of their job security, will take the AP workshops and order the AP materials for their classes?

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Make it clear to them that periods of silence, when the class is trying to come up with cute answers to a question, are welcome. Just sit there in that quiet space. It’s o.k. - sometimes everybody needs time to think.
 
If the silence really drags out, do a retell right then. Then watch as the right cute answer emerges.

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The most prevalent thing I have noticed in schools over all these years is a feeling of fear in the building. It kind of weaves itself in and around everything in the building. In some places/classrooms it is greater than in others. Kids feel it. Teachers try to ignore it, some with greater success than others.

Where is this fear coming from? Could it be from the feeling put on students by teachers that they may not be “good enough” in their classes? Multiply that, in the case of some kids, by five classes and you have fear. The fear of not being good enough, of being a burden to others, of lacking what others have, of not being part of the group, of sucking at it. When that fear is there, no one, absolutely no one, can learn anything.

That feeling of fear (we see it in some kids’ faces all day) has become accepted and normal in our schools. It has been a part of American secondary education for over a century now. No one even notices it anymore. The strong survive and the weak don’t - that’s just the way it is.

Some teachers actually blame the failure to learn that results from this fear on the kid. But that doesn’t mean that it comes from the kid. The teacher must break this fear and turn it into a feeling of success in the student. 

Bringing success to the student, guaranteeing it when they walk into the classroom, not some new fangled teaching method, can, alone, bring the success that we all want for our kids. No method can erase and banish the fear from school buildings, but a change in how we do things in terms of process, not method, can.

The teacher who allows herself to focus only on the ”academic needs” of the child forgets that those needs are inextricably linked to the child’s social needs for acceptance. A child who feels no success because they are not good enough and because they are shunned is a victim of biased, almost inhuman, instruction. The process going on in the classroom is wrong.

When the class doesn’t have a positive affective element, which by definition, because we are humans, is a participatory and reciprocal need, it is a dead class, and then that fear creeps in and stays there all year, getting really bad, really thick, as the year wears on. It often takes an entire summer for that fear to dissipate, only to rear its ugly head again at some point in the fall, because the process is wrong.

Unless the process of what we do in American foreign language classrooms changes, the same pattern of darkness, of exclusion of over half (up to 90% in some classrooms) of the students taking the class will be caked onto the walls of the classroom by spring, and the teacher will wonder what the hell they are doing in the profession and need a vacation and complain about the kids, all the time missing the point, that what they are doing in the classroom is the reason that they and their students are unhappy.

Some kids don’t even want to come to school because of that feeling of fear that is largely the product of proud and unaware teachers who don’t get the participatory and social nature of language acquisition. The teachers who are most responsible for the fear are the least aware of it. They are the ones who attack Krashen. God bless them, for their hold on what we do is getting much weaker now.

We all know, intuitively at least, that Krashen and Blaine have put a major hammer down on this feeling of fear, and that what they are offering the world of language learning is real. It is hard to refuse the fact that we cannot learn languages by speaking English in the classroom. Those guys have figured out a way to make language learning successful for all students. What they have brought to the game of teaching languages is interest and fun.

With interesting and meaningful comprehensible input in the classroom via stories and personalized discussion, the students’ brain locks onto the language in a way that it can never hope to do in traditional language classes, where everything is limited to functioning in the left hemisphere of the brain, which is not where the fun lies. Krashen and Blaine have made language learning a whole brain experience.

The research just piles up. Jen sent a link to yet another article that proves that the table has been upended and the stress and fear involved in learning languages are, as we speak, being ushered out of school buildings all over the country. No longer will language learning be for the privileged few - it will be for everybody as this change kicks in now into a higher gear, one that is becoming more and more palpable every day.

When we all realize, finally, that anybody can learn a language and that language classes can be the place in school buildings where there are the lowest, instead of the highest, levels of fear, we all will have come closer to being a part of the change in our society away from fear based thinking to teaching based on love. That’s what this is really about.

 Here is the link that Jen sent:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/radical-teaching/201005/want-children-pay-attention-make-their-brains-curious

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Another email from K - it may have already appeared here but I repeat it just in case it didn’t. It is important and describes many of our colleagues:

Mr. Slavic:

I need some help. I have a few questions, that there might not be answers to but please let me know what you think:

I have known that next year I shall have a different teacher. It’s the way IB works. The other teacher teaches traditionally and has been generally unwilling to try anything else. This is “fine” (not really, but that’s the way things work sometimes). Anyway, she came to our French class yesterday to explain our summer assignment for her class next year. I knew this was coming too. She greets us in French, and when we all respond in French, she smiles…. until she sees me. She looks at me and smiles, but not a real smile, it’s fake and mean-hearted, almost like a disgusted smirk. As she passes out the packets, she says to me, “Next year, I will not tolerate any of that story stuff, I think it’s ridiculous. I respond “Je sais Madame. Je ne veux pas créer de problème pour vous.” She moves on and starts explaining what we have to do, and how important grammar will be next year. A girl from the lunch group asks “Why do we have to do so much grammar? Stories are better. They are easy and fun, and we get to know words that we actually use.” She glares at the girl and then at me.

This girl talked to me afterwards and said that she was worried about French next year, and might not go. How do you explain to someone that they have to do something and basically lie because they still have to do something even if something else is way better? Someone has to be the calm rational adult even if that person isn’t an adult.

I will continue the lunch stories next year since no one can really stop me…. they can according to a few Supreme Court cases about speech in schools, but they haven’t read those. However, my heart breaks for this girl and the others. Stories are better, they know it and so do I. This is (going to an extreme) denying kids the opportunity to have a high quality education where they can learn without hassle. In my opinion, it’s a human right.

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[Ed. note: K is a rising sophomore IB kid in a Denver area high school who learned with CI methods in eighth grade and has been reporting to us over the past year about what she experienced in her French I class last year in that IB program. She will hopefully continue with these reports into next year. In the following email, K exposes a fraudulent teacher. The English version is below her French version]:

Bonjour M. Slavic,

J’ai une question pour vous. Je fais mes devoirs d’ete pour PIB French 2 et J’ai un problème. Je dois lire une histoire et puis écrire un résumé. Nous sommes censés utiliser l’imparfait. Mais, je tiens à dire “Il a dit que Jean-Pierre ne pouvait pas avoir un chien” ou “Il voulait un chien.” Ceux-ci utilisent l’imparfait. La plupart des étudiants ne savent pas l’imparfait. Mais je sais l’imparfait [ed. note: she learned it in 8th grade, a class that was not accepted by the high school for a year of credit because it was a middle school class]. Je ne veux pas que mon professeur de penser que je trichais. Alors, J’ai envoyé un e-mail à son. (Ce n’est pas mon professeur de l’année prochaine, mais elle attribué les devoirs alors elle corriger.) Elle dit que je ne pouvais pas utiliser l’imparfait parce que la plupart des étudiants ne savent pas l’imparfait. Si elle voyait l’imparfait dans leurs documents, elle leur manquent pour avoir triché. Il ne serait pas juste pour me permettre d’utiliser l’imparfait quand tout le monde ne pouvait pas. J’ai dit que je suis prête à passer un test sur l’imparfait. Elle a dit non. Au contraire, elle m’a dit pour changer l’imparfait au passé compose même si elle nest pas correcte parce que tout le monde sait le passe compose. Je suis fachée. Je suis heureuse qu’elle n’est pas mon professeur l’annee prochaine mais ma question est que dois je faire?

(I have a question for you. I am doing my summer homework for French 2 and I have a problem. I have to read a story and then write a synopsis. We are not allowed to use the imperfect tense. But I insist on saying, “He said that Jean-Pierre could not have a dog” or “He wanted a dog.” These use the imperfect. Most of the students don’t know the imperfect. I don’t want my teacher to think that I was cheating. So, I sent her an email. (It’s not my teacher for next year, but she assigned the homework so she is correcting it). She says that I wouldn’t be able to use the imperfect because most of the students don’t know the imperfect. If she saw the imperfect in their papers, she would take points off for cheating. It wouldn’t be right to allow me to use the imperfect when every one else couldn’t. I said that I am ready to pass a test on the imperfect. She said no. On the contrary, she told me to change the imperfect into the the passe compose even if it is wrong because everyone knows the passe compose. I am angry. I am happy that she is not my teacher next year but my question is what should I do?)

Kaley further comments:

This [situation] is very messed up, and a major problem with the traditional method. They only teach you a limited number of topics per year and you are limited to using that information even if you know more. The idea that a student would study and learn French outside the classroom is very foreign to them and so if they see something “advanced” in writing, they assume they used a translator, which is cheating. So, now I must use the wrong tense even though I know the correct one, just because others don’t know it. We are making mediocrity the standard… and they say IB is better than that…. Ha! Grrrr!

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