A repost:
One way to get better at this is to relax and slow down, of course. But there is also another key to this stuff. Just ask yourself, “What do I want to teach here?” It’s a good question because many times we have this blanket of stuff we want to teach and the kids get smothered by blankets of too much information, actually in all their classes all day. Less truly is more in TPRS. See:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2008/07/12/we-teach-stucture/
We want to teach our kids what two or three things mean and sound like. These are obviously the two or three structures that we target in step 1 to set up what amounts to backwards planning for the story and the reading in step 2.
We just keep our minds on those structures in the three steps. We return to them constantly. The kids must have the repetitions in their deeper minds if they are to later have the capacity to decipher the story and the reading. The structures we target in step 1 – they can be anything – are our base. They are the rebar rods –
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/03/11/rebar-1/ (six articles)
that inform and reinforce all we do in the three steps of TPRS. All the other things, the marvelous things that the students learn secondarily to those two or three structures, counterintuitively, cannot be learned if they are focused on. They are part of the Net as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/08/30/trust-the-net/
This concept that we can plan the learning of a language is not going to last much longer. The new focus on lesson planning and the planning of curricula, by focusing the view of administrators more and more on what works, i.e. the Net Hypothesis via comprehensible input, will cause them to realize that foreign language acquisition is an entirely different kettle of fish and that we must plan curricula around Krashen’s Net theory and CI. (Yup, I said it – kettle of fish. What a great expression! A different kettle of fish. There I said it again.)
I am amazed at how fast some CI teachers jump to judge Krashen’s work as only part of the theory that goes into TPRS. It’s all of it. Blaine Ray set out to create a system of teaching – he did this consciously – that was, again consciously, based entirely on Krashen.
I would allow into the equation mention of the Early Russian King of Insight and Greatness, Lev Vygotsky (whom our Ben Lev is names after), and his Zone of Proximal Development, which speak thunderously to the role of the unconscious mind in language acquisition, and I would point also to the work of Simon Belasco as per the “1963” article published here a few days ago. I would also mention VanPatten of course, but sometimes he gets a bit too smart for me.
But I can say that TPRS is really about Krashen, Ray, and Susan Gross. They played the role of Santa Claus in this thing. It is a rare, very rare, find in our profession. Ray is a prospector who 25 years ago happened to find the mother lode. That’s all there is to it and the mother lode is Krashen.
OK, those who disagree, have at me on my hubris on these points, but it was fun to say it before you empty your cartridges on me. I’m wearing a Kevlar/Krashen vest.
When the tipping point is reached, as is happening in many buildings right now, what we will be asked to do in our school buildings will change to reflect the way kids really learn languages.
Krashen has shown that we learn languages unconsciously. I won’t stop saying that because that is the piece that most CI teachers miss. It turns everything they ever knew on its head. It’s outrageous in its implications. It can barely be stuffed into schools at all, the way they are set up and more than a few really gifted teachers have left the classroom at great financial sacrifice to start their own little businesses, because they don’t want to try to stuff what they can do into school buildings and I don’t blame them.
Make your life simple as a language teacher. Yes it looks complex but you can learn it if you are new. It’s just a retooling process. It only looks complicated. The core of it is pure and simple. The core of it is very much like the metal gold. You can do it. Once you do, you will never look back because you will have time to play golf, which is one reason Blaine gives for inventing TPRS.
Do the three steps by starting out in PQA with two or three structures, PQA them as much as you can and as long as you can. Be exhaustive about that and let the good times roll when doing so. Then let the story develop from a high quality script, and after that write an embedded reading from the story created, and watch your kids’ knowledge of the language you are teaching them soar upon reading it.
Only one thing counts, and that is how students feel when they leave your classroom. Has the time you spent with them been uplifting or do they feel downtrodden. Only you can determine that. Every single word written on this site over the past eight years point has had one goal behind it – to find ways to assure that when students leave our classrooms every day, they feel uplifted, like they can do it.
Avoid using canned materials that are termed TPRS “curricula”. Use them only as training wheels. They can get the bike going, but the bike can’t go very fast with them on. Ultimately, such materials don’t work, and a lot of people have quit because they didn’t know when to take the training wheels off. A good story script is needed to get the TPRS bike going on its own.
The false information that TPRS curricula work has been a disservice to a lot of people. There is no such thing as a TPRS curriculum. Learn to fly on your own wings by following the three steps – they are as prescriptive as you want to get in this method. They provide strong banks to keep the river of CI flowing nicely and from flooding out into the stinky fields of bad CI instruction, but they don’t smother the process like TPRS curricula do.