I was talking with Skip Crosby today. He heads up the Maine TCI/TPRS/CI efforts and anybody up there need only email him for very gracious training and support in the New England area – muybien.crosby@gmail.com.
Skip mentioned that, when Anne Matava recently presented a story with some of her upper level students to some teachers in Maine, “the 100 people [there] were really intrigued. In fact, recently I had a group of ladies say that what Anne did was fantastic but it wasn’t TPRS…”.
Now this reveals a ton of information that we need to be aware of. The opinion of more than a few American language teachers, it seems, is, unbelievably, incorrect! We know the comment to be wrong, because, to put it simply, it is wrong. But the vast majority of teachers, like the one who made that comment, believe that they are right, and that teaching for real fluency is not TPRS.
And yet, I have worked hard with Anne on teaching via private emails for over six years now, and I feel that what she does is very pure comprehension based instruction, in terms of what I have learned about it from Susan Gross. If any one of us can be said to be “doing TPRS”, it is Anne.
In fact, when Anne demonstrated a class a few years ago when I was in Maine, watching her interact with that group of Hogs (the famous Hogs) actually kind of blew my mind. It was the first time I had seen an upper level group of kids trained uniquely with comprehensible input and I remember sitting there saying to myself, “Man, this shit really works!”
I mean, she was going on and on back and forth with them in very fast German and the kids didn’t even seem aware that there was any other language in the world than German. In that moment I saw what this method is all about. It was in that group of mixed level 3/4 students that I “got” what can happen if the instructor just uses comprehensible input for the first two or three years.
I remember pressing Anne on the amount of German she used when she was with her baby hogs and she said above 98% or so. I remember her pointing out that the way the method had been presented to her was that you were supposed to use almost zero English. (In the past few years, many of us have ratcheted our CI percentage up from around 70% to 80% to the high 90% range so that is a good thing.)
Krashen uses the term “light years” to describe how TPRS beats other language acquisition methods out there. And yet in the above described comment we see that many (most) teachers who experience the method have gotten a seriously distorted view of it. Many think it is for small children, which is ridiculous, and on and on and on. The ignorance is very widespread.
That must drive Blaine and Susie bonkers. Here they have created a way to implement Krashen’s research that is far better than any other attempts so far made in the language acquisition world, and nobody is actually doing it in a way that is consistent with the original model, which in my view is displayed most accurately by Susan Gross.
I asked Susie about it years ago and she said that of 99 people attending her workshops, only one even gets what she says, let alone puts it into practice. It’s so bizarre. Well, maybe not so bizarre in that this method does in fact require a complete make-over by the teacher not just in terms of the pedagogy but also in the heart and mind.