I was discussing with my coordinator (at the university) my ideas that using tprs could help us with our lower level retention issues, particularly with minority students. She always wants to “see the research” on things, wants data, wants statistics. Wants to know if there has been any long-term research done showing whether tprs students retain their language abilities.
Which has made me think, is there any research out there supporting long-term language ability retention for our “conventional” grammar-based methodologies? (Or even, analyzing what percentage of typical first year students show any short-term language ability gains?) It seems strange to me that I don’t hear anyone at the university asking these questions about the methodology we are now using. If we actually analyzed what our own students (don’t) learn to do, we’d have no justification for what we do in our classrooms every day.
The coordinator is warming up to the idea of tprs, has agreed to let me do this in my three sections of fourth-semester Spanish for the spring. But when I confronted her with the overwhelming difficulty of practically having to learn linguistics and language theory in order to learn any Spanish in a basic university class, plus the vocab bombardment, in response to my “don’t you think there has to be a better way?” she seemed almost programmed to spout back that of course there must be a better way, but it would never work for us with our limited contact hours, therefore the grammar methodology is better.
Of course, all of this is made even more interesting and ironic by the fact that I’ve probably been teaching Spanish since before she went to kindergarten. I might possibly have previously thought what it hasn’t even yet occurred to her to think, and I might have learned something watching twenty years’ worth of 18-22-year-olds NOT become fluent in Spanish, despite my unrivaled ability to clarify the mysteries of what stem-changing verbs do in their deepest, darkest conjugational moments.
So do either of you have any documentation you would recommend for me to share with her, or should I just teach my ass off next semester and invite her to visit a lot and watch my students grow?
On the encouraging side, one of my fifth graders brought her mom’s Mexican coworker to tears with her beautifully pronounced, comprehendingly sung rendition of “Noche de paz” last night. And my own fourth grade daughter, as she helped me sort 75 ten-page (yes, TEN page) comprehensive Spanish 101 finals, kept asking, “Mom, how old are these people? Why did they all do so badly on this test? I think I can even understand most of this test, Mom, and I’m only nine years old!”
(I think I’m going to analyze those final exam grades by race and see if any interesting statistics pop up for my comprehensive-grammar-vocab-exam-loving coordinator …)
I don’t want to give the wrong impression about our coordinator. She *does* want to see our students learn Spanish. She has an incredible amount of energy, she’s extremely thorough, she does her job well, she gets to know her students and tries to draw them in, and she’s obviously open to new ideas. She did research into TPRS on her own in preparation for meeting with me to discuss my spring classes, she asks good and logical questions, and she wants to visit my classes often to learn what is different about this approach, and see how well it works for my students.
The issue here is that she “grew up”, in a university sense, under the big-money-textbook-driven reign of the “communicative” approach. These horrendously expensive textbook systems, particularly those by the biggest-name professor in the communicative university Spanish textbook biz, force (bad) output while force-feeding hundreds of (mostly unnecessary and promptly forgotten) vocabulary words per chapter. That method just doesn’t work for the vast majority of our students, and those that come from backgrounds where they were not at all well-prepared linguistically or grammatically, essentially have to learn two languages to pass the class — the language of linguistics, followed by Spanish grammar. They’re scared, they’re discouraged, it’s too hard, they can’t remember all those words and all those rules, and we’ve given them no contextualized, input-driven reason to care whether they remember them or not. And that’s just 101 … they still have to get through three more semesters of this, trying to master verb tense after verb tense when most of them still can’t even carry on the most basic of conversations, and they’re scared to even try. (And by the way, we’re losing a noticeable number of these students to the more exotic languages at our university, where there is no King Textbook, the professors use lots of input in class, play music, watch videos and read authentic texts online, cook, laugh … have fun!!)
Bryce has a document he’s put together called “The Basics of TPRS.” When I read it last night, it was like a light dawned. He helped me finally truly understand the problem here — WE, the language teachers, are the weird ones. WE are the ones who are different/strange/unusual — because we like this stuff. We get it, it comes easy to us, finding the patterns in grammar thrills us, we actually like making adjective endings match the nouns and conjugating verbs in every tense known to man. We’re like 8 year old boys with new legos, fascinated with the process of putting things together. OTHER PEOPLE AREN’T THIS WAY. Most of our students ARE NOT this way. Trying to force them to learn this stuff “the hard way” like we did just won’t work. That grammar-based system worked for us because we actually liked the process; the grammar itself was our “compelling input” because something inside our twisted 😉 minds thrilled to the puzzle of it all.
So. When I look at our coordinator and hear what she says, deep down inside, I grow weary, because I’ve said all these things and thought all these things before. In 20+ years of university Spanish classes, I’ve thought it all and tried it all. And none of it worked. To be perfectly honest, in all those years, I can think of maybe two kids who really, truly “got it” because of their experiences in my classroom. I now understand that THEY WERE WEIRD ONES LIKE ME. The others all just temporarily played with verb conjugations and jumped through the right hoops to pass the class — or didn’t, and left to try Thai or dare to enter a math classroom and switch to a B.S. And then, last summer, when I sat for hours on that uncomfortable hotel meeting room chair and actually found myself acquiring and understanding (the Blaine Ray version of 😉 German after only a couple of short lessons … I finally, truly, GOT IT. And now, at 45, I’m re-learning how to do this language-teacher thing the right way.