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One Must Choose
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21 thoughts on “One Must Choose”
Person B has said the same thing to me. B confuses teaching and acquiring. There are many ways to teach (with CI), only one way to acquire (CI). I’ve made this VERY clear for Person B who refuses to hear me and never engages me in any discussion. I think Person B is simply incapable of having the discussion – ignorant of SLA and TCI, but also closed-minded (isn’t trying to understand). We could say that Alisa and I have provided her with the “CI,” but her affective filter is too high and/or the info is beyond her i+1.
Person B’s “affective filter is too high”. That pretty much sums it up. But Eric you and Alisa have not given up on her. The language teaching world appreciates your efforts to deconfuse Person B, even if it is oblivious to the last few months of behind-the-scenes between you two and Person B. I love it. And don’t forget that Person B insulted Carol Gaab with a slap down statement, about two years ago. You don’t do that.
I have been reading and looking at videos etc. I’ve read this and yes I guess it’s true: “we can never recreate the 1st language acquisition environment”. But does that mean that we shouldn’t try to create an environment as close to that as possible?
Is the argument that we should be forcing more memorization of vocab? Ok so we’ll do some memorization. Then what? Either way students need to be hearing the language. Those of us that have lived in a foreign country forced to speak the language know that the only reason we were able to recognize new words when we heard them was because they were repeated so often that they eventually became recognizable. I don’t see how there is anything for either side to be upset or have feelings hurt about. If all parties are looking for truth, won’t we naturally take a step towards each other and recognize and adopt into practice the truly effective principles found in each method?
Could you elaborate on this Craig, perhaps with some examples of which parties you mean?
… if all parties are looking for truth, won’t we naturally take a step towards each other and recognize and adopt into practice the truly effective principles found in each method?….
I am suddenly feeling very conscious of my inexperience in this field, and my newness as part of this community. I am aware that in this field I still do not know what I’m doing nearly as much as the rest of you. I feel driven to seek the truth. To adopt the truly best practices and things that really work from as many methods and foundational principles as possible as long as they each truly reach students on a meaningful level. I don’t think the “all or nothing” stance that this “B person” has taken is constructive. I think in my immense inexperience that one should try to build bridges between widely differing schools of thought and approaches to language instruction. I would think that there is common ground that can be built upon in almost every approach. Then again I may be completely wrong. If that’s the truth, I am willing to accept that!
Craig,
I admire your quest for Best Practice. You are in the right place – this PLC is a wonderful venue to share ideas, experiences, research, and opinions.
As for a conglomeration of methods and common ground, I see it simply, after trying an eclectic toolbox of communicative activities for 20 years:
Time spent doing that was at the expense of time providing rich Comprehensible Input – the foundation of acquisition. There are only so many WL instructional minutes in the week – we must optimize them!
Once my WL department was trained in the basic practices of T/CI (i.e., circling, PQA, ‘asking’ a story) we began to notice an immediate change in our classrooms. Engagement shot through the roof. Time on TL skyrocketed. Student comprehension of incoming messages, now appropriately scaffolded, reached an all-time high. Teachers were eager to share scenes, stories, anecdotes, props and other resources with each other. We were laughing a whole lot more.
It’s not an overstatement to say that T/CI completely reinvigorated our entire WL department. Are there ideas I’ve kept from my Communicative Method days? Not a whole lot. Those were anchored in MY ideas and passions, not in the students’. I have dumped a lot of my past curriculum, materials & resources in favor of a student centered classroom. As we say, “The students ARE the curriculum.”
Craig I loudly applaud your openness to all angles that color this discussion as well as the honest nature of your personal search to find the best answer for you and your students.
Allow me to comment on one point you raised:
… I would think that there is common ground that can be built upon in almost every approach….
I think that the term “common ground” is misleading. The implication is that the old way of doing things, as expressed clearly without fanfare or emotion by Alisa above, and in many thousands of posts here over the years as well, has some good stuff, and the new way of doing things (CI) has some good stuff, and we can work together to find “common ground”.
This is Curtain’s position and probably the ACTFL FL Educators have said the same. The controlling message is also found in the comments to Nathaniel by Professor Specious at UMass. Common ground is a real good servant term of the people who run the show in US language education. It protects them from doing any real introspection and honest reflection on one of the biggest elephants in the room of education in America, CI. So the issue I have with it is that the term has become a very powerful tool to dismiss the radical and the new, the revolutionary.
There is no common ground with the old way of teaching languages any more than those who clung to the idea that the world is flat could claim that they and those who embraced the idea that the world was round could find, literally in this case, common ground. The ground is not common. It’s one way or the other. We either speak to our students and have them read so that the process is unconscious or we teach them to memorize and learn using the conscious faculty of the brain. The split is that dramatic. Whole brain/right brain instruction or left brain/have witted instruction. No common ground! Which will it be? One must choose.
Alisa describes it clearly above in this sentence:
…time spent doing that was at the expense of time providing rich Comprehensible Input – the foundation of acquisition….
Which is it, Helena? Which is it, Professor Specious? Which is it, Arizona?
This sentence is from Martin Luther King, Jr. –
…we who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive….
The reason I bring that up is that I feel we arrived at a point where we have embraced a certain need in our group to just make ourselves invisible in our buildings.
It is not a decision born of weakness but of the need to survive in our buildings. The opposition to the nonviolent direct action that we bring to the table has been staggering and we can’t just raise hell in our buildings.
It is far too dangerous and so, correct me if I am wrong here but for those who have read here for the past eight years or so, isn’t it true that we always temper our little bitchy flare ups with the need to avoid nonviolent direct action and just keep learning how to be better teachers using CI?
Just this morning I received an email from another teacher new to CI who got crushed this year:
“My school situation was classic – department head who wanted to institute change and introduced us to CI then when I embraced it, she punked me in the observation because she didn’t recognize what I was doing. I failed to front-load her abundantly like a child so she could see how great it was going. Anyway, when I challenged the observation, that was the end of my future there.
“HOWEVER, I truly believe that CI and TPRS etc is the greatest thing to happen to my career. It was amazing how easy the most difficult classes became and when I strayed into traditional drill and kill style how much more difficult the classes were. So, I know that I will get to use this wonderful approach again in some way.”
So no one and nothing was able to help this teacher keep her job. She got punked and that’s it, by a colleague who made the call in favor of CI until it went beyond her comfort zone (how fast that happens!).
So where is this group going? Eric and Robert and that group that handed the FL Educators their asses on a plate last November, as well as Eric and Alisa doing the same with Helena Curtain in the past few weeks, have in their non-violent direct action honored Dr. King’s vision. Or do we not write these emails to the Dep’t. Chair at UMass, so aptly named Professor Specious by Alisa?
What are we going to do now? Not act? No emails? I’m curious. I see an opportunity to do some very righteous activism here with this UMass thing, along the lines of what Michael Coxon did in Arizona. Or maybe we just lie down and take a summer snooze? Who could blame us? Could we write an email and cc it to tons of college people AND take a summer snooze?
“The reason I bring that up is that I feel we arrived at a point where we have embraced a certain need in our group to just make ourselves invisible in our buildings.
It is not a decision born of weakness but of the need to survive in our buildings. The opposition to the nonviolent direct action that we bring to the table has been staggering and we can’t just raise hell in our buildings.
It is far too dangerous and so, correct me if I am wrong here but for those who have read here for the past eight years or so, isn’t it true that we always temper our little bitchy flare ups with the need to avoid nonviolent direct action and just keep learning how to be better teachers using CI?”
There is such truth in these words. The need to survive… pray that I can just close my door and hangout with the kinder in French. Great conversation.
Ben,
Thank you for your explanation. I very much appreciate the clear, straight-forward perspective that you and others on this blog provide. I see how it really does come down to a choice. Thinking about making my students memorize and conjugate makes me feel sick to my stomach because I know those things aren’t useful and don’t build language. I can see how the term common ground can be twisted according to one’s agenda.
Craig said:
…I can see how the term common ground can be twisted according to one’s agenda….
Bam!
This is beautifully written, Alisa. Thanks for sharing it — will come back here if I need to say something on this topic (we are not teaching “one way” at all!).
Eric, it seems to me that the confusion of teaching and acquisition is related to belief that what teachers do in class leads linearly to results in students. That is, it’s thinking that language proficiency is a controlled, conscious process, not something much deeper in the mind where acquisition really occurs. I think fluency writing shows that students are becoming creative language users beyond the direct instruction we give. They’re developing language capability as a whole. In a typical classroom, it’s very much about memorizing and repeating, which means their writing shows very little newness. They have to copy from examples and they lack a feel for the language itself. I’m speaking of my own students’ results, at least.
[Please note that all of the following I’m saying in a very happy sing-song whisper!] On the point about dividing the profession as intimated by Person B. I hate it when people talk about division in the profession and thereby try to discredit the whistleblowers as if they were bad elements that needed to be culled from the “unified” pack. What happened to good old robust debate about our central workplace issues amongst polite and not-so-polite, thick-skinned, professionally-trained teachers who also just happen to bring to the table something called buckets of passion? Mercy! What happened to the notion that what we survive makes us stronger, and that adversarial positions for the sake of sharpening our critical powers should be the very essence of science, academia, and democracy?
Well said, Mark. Below is what I said to Person B, but nothing I said seems to have changed B’s perspective, since the correspondence with Alisa came after me.
“We can have different approaches, different guiding SLA theories, and still be united! We all develop more as professionals when there IS difference.”
And anyone with a clue about SLA knows there are a lot of different theories and perspectives. Therefore, there is room for a lot of different teaching approaches that are based on SLA.
Or, we could view what we do as “Creative Disruption”. That’s a term the business entities would understand.
To the accusation that we are splintering off or fragmenting the profession, I have never felt the kind of common purpose I do now, as part of a grassroots teacher community, seeking to reform WL teaching. For the nearly 20 years prior, I felt like a lone wolf, snatching appealing ideas willy nilly, with no clear lens to determine their appropriateness or effectiveness. I guess we are moving in a different direction from traditional thematic and grammar teachers – but we have ACTFL’s 90% and 3 modes to buttress our position.
SO much edu-mumbo-jumbo about teachers being slow to change, and the lightning speed changes in our global community, blah, blah, blah…and here we are, dumping the old, researching, creating and embracing the new/better, which is really modeled on a most primordial foundation: The communication between parents and their babies!
Amen!
“embracing the new/better, which is really modeled on a most primordial foundation: The communication between parents and their babies!”
I try to keep a sense of humor about the absurdity of how we have to overcomplicate things! Otherwise I would cry.
The whole “unity” thing is very American. Typically it comes up in politics when people object to what the government is doing e.g. invading Iraq. IMHO divisin is good. The problem is, people hate being told that, in effect, they are wrong, even if they are. You can give someone a VanPatten or Krashen article and they will ignore it or say “well my students learn…” Or “I believe…”
Man is it EVER time for summer break. My bitchy class has been on a two week diet of novel reading since they are too cool for story school.
This me of the refrain I have heard this year:
There is more than one way to teach, you know.
I have heard that several times. This year. What does that mean? Why would anyone say that? How does one respond to such a statement?
Do I say, “Oh, really? Thanks. I never knew that.”
Or, “How many ways are there?”
Or, “Let’s see. You teach one way and I teach another way. Why, wha’d ya know? That’s two ways right there.”
Or, “Let me think. Before I taught how I teach now I taught another way, and before that I taught a different way. That makes two…no, make that three ways.”
Or, “Wait a second. You are begging the question. Shouldn’t you first ask me whether or not I believe there is only one way to teach? Or at least ask me how many ways I think there are to teach?
Or, “No way. There can’t be more than one way to teach. I used to teach like my teacher taught me and now I teach…ah…different. Why, I do believe you are right, there are two ways to teach.”
Or, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Or, “I always kind a thought grammar-based explanations and comprehensible input were basically the same thing. I never thought of them as more than one way to teach.”
Or, “Doesn’t that open up a can of worms? That might mean there is more than one way to write a letter, or more than one way to cook a carrot, or more than one way to exercise, or more than one way to make a living. Yikes, this is getting complicated.”
Or, “Reminds me of the story where the teacher knew 437 1/2 ways to teach. Yeah, really, I think it was written by Blaine Somethin’ or other. Don’t quite remember the last name.
Nice, Nate! 😉
“There’s more than one way to teach you know.” is defensive ‘teacher-speak”
Translation: “I’m right, you’re wrong, end of conversation.”
How many times have you bitten your tongue Nathaniel? :o)
with love,
Laurie