A member of the greater CI community, but not of this PLC, recently wrote:
…if someone is a purist about TPRS, then they have the right to be. If someone is a “dabbler” and hasn’t gotten “on track” in the way that you would like, well, that is who they are. If someone has found, or claims to have created something new and wonderful, they probably believe that they have….
Tina responded:
[This person] wrote:
“If someone has found, or claims to have created something new and wonderful, they probably believe that they have.”
I wanted to point out that, perhaps you were not talking about Ben and his Invisibles, but there has been a good bit of discussion as to whether or not they represent anything new, so this made me think. Ben has, in my opinion, hit upon something that combines elements of TPRS as he practiced it for fifteen years with some novel systems and procedures that make it possible to tell stories that are not based on scripts, and craft original and fun stories out of the kids’ creations. Is it TPRS? Well, it is teaching for proficiency, and it is using storytelling and reading, so I vote yes in that sense. But on the other hand, it does not follow the Three Steps of TPRS so I vote no in that sense. And it does not use pre-selected target words nor aim for repetitions, nor for 100% transparency.
This was a longtime dream of his and a big reason that I first became interested in the innovations he has been creating since about seven or eight years ago now. He has told me many times that he always felt a little out of place with his desire to move into more spontaneous language. I know that I was very interested in the Realm that he was writing about back on his old blog in 2008 or so. It was an unscripted medieval world that he created with his kids. I was fascinated by his working with simple imagination and with no clear language targets. The Realm had its problems, though, so he never ended up writing the book TPRS in the Realm! that I was hoping for so I could learn to try it in my classes. I finally learned from Ben that the problems were mainly about plot and depth of I feel like the new book has finally achieved what he wanted to do all that time ago, which is to move his teaching into a more spontaneous, creative direction.
He has told me several times that he would use Anne Matura’s scripts because they were the closest thing to using “emergent targets” as he could get. He would Point and Pause to the structures that were new to the kids as he created the stories with them. I never quite got the hang of that myself, so when I would use scripts, I would pre-teach the words at the top like I had learned in my TRPS trainings.
I once read a comment from Kathrin who is in Germany, who is finding great success with the Invisibles system in her German classes, who wrote regarding the Invisibles and the “Are they a completely new invention?” debate, “Do you really have to reinvent the wheel to come up with something new? Can’t you just change the material and composition and have it be new and exciting? I feel like I have gone from a wooden wheel to a rubber one, the basic idea stays the same but the ride is so much smoother.”
That is exactly how it struck me when I started working with this system as well. Of course, this way of storytelling will not be up everyone’s alley. We all have to make our own decisions in our work. Some of us strive for 100% transparency, others want to have the kids be able to fluidly output certain structures by the end of the period. Others want to give students a flow of language that contains new words,
No one pulls new things out of the air, a priori. I do not recall Ben ever saying that he had not simply recombined some elements of TPRS with his own intuition, to make a system that made his longtime dream come true – being able to provide high-interest, unscripted, untargeted compelling comprehensible input to his classes.