There is a descriptor for one of the other CI Facebook sites – CI/TPRS for French Teachers – that caught my eye yesterday:
“We welcome any new or experienced teachers who want to share and improve their CI skills.
“There are many ways of providing comprehensible input in the classroom: Total Physical Response (TPR), Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS), Story-Listening, using targeted or untargeted input, etc.
“Along with these philosophies come many tools: Personalized Questions & Answers (PQA), Movie Talk, One Word Image (OWI), Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), etc.
“Whatever your CI philosophy is, you are welcome in this group. We are excited to grow together! And if you don’t know any of these terms, we are excited to help you.”
What this message does is throw the non-targeted approach – see part in bold letters above – into the sandbox as just another toy with the other TPRS toys. This concerns me, because Tina Hargaden and I feel that what we have developed in NTCI is not just another toy, but a vastly more powerful way of doing CI than what came earlier as it is presented at the (unchanging over the past 20 years) summer conferences – NTPRS and iFLT. (For those new to this group who really want to get into that last statement, see https://benslavic.com/blog/hit-list-of-8/)
Our group member Tina Van Brunt wrote this today about those TPRS toys, and the sandbox they have been in for 20 years (that is some pretty old sand…):
“It’s true that I learned a lot of things at the conferences. My instruction was always well received but I didn’t know how to replicate it on a daily basis, manage my classes, and feel like I was doing justice to the language.
“Enter: Enter: The Big CI Book, then A Natural Approach to Stories, and finally A Natural Approach to the Year. You and Tina have given me the support and resources I needed. I can’t tell you how thankful I am to have found them.”
I very much appreciate what Tina said here today about the new stuff. The other Tina and I have worked our minds to the bones, it feels like sometimes, over the past three years, to build another approach to teaching CI that we feel works FOR US much better than the old stuff (see related articles below), and for that FB group to just glop NTCI into the usual bag of candy as just another approach to CI sends in my opinion an uninformed opinion. Truly, “uninformed” is the exact word that needs to be used here. Most teachers who dismiss NTCI as just another tool in the toolbox and not as the rocket-fueled space traveler that it really is, are doing a disservice to teacher who have not yet explored it.
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/system/
https://benslavic.com/blog/candy-2/