Recent postings on the ACTFL list continue to polarize our profession between old school and storytelling teachers. We started with a great question by Eric about content and materials and now we seem to have gotten pulled back into the old TPRS vs. The World argument. I acknowledge my own role in that shift of focus.
Tons of traditional teachers on ACTFL just don’t want to hear what we are saying about thematic units. They don’t see our point about how language learning is unconscious. They don’t really get how people actually acquire languages. They will continue to inflict bad (read “based in conscious analysis of language”) teaching on millions of kids. And we are not going to change them.
So what to do? We can only make that decision for ourselves. I personally need to exit that ACTFL discussion and toss the five pages of blistering notes in unedited form I have gathered in angry response to some of the dumb things said over there as a reaction to Eric’s original questions. I need out of that discussion. It’s not a wrestling match and we are not going to win.
This is not to say that some of us shouldn’t keep mixing it up over there. We should always ask good questions. Catharina’s request for a refund for the June Phillips class is a good example of a line of reasoning that in my view should be publicly presented to the ACTFL hardliners, so that people can at least know of yet another fundamental hypocrisy in the current ACTFL corporate mentality.
The fact that Laurie Clarcq hasn’t joined that online argument is something I have noticed. I think there is a reason for it. Her quietness on this issue speaks loudly to me. Her silence reminds me to be silent so that I can keep my focus on what is most important – becoming a better teacher and do what I can to help others get better at comprehensible input, leaving alone those things that I can’t change and knowing the difference.
All that intellectualized bullshit over there has taken our eye off the ball. Much of what they are saying in response to Eric completely ignores, again (I have to repeat and repeat this because it is my truth) the career busting fact that languages are learned unconsciously.
If ACTFL ever fully embraced that single idea it would destroy all its own arguments about thematic units, etc. and their organization would have to change and it would be a change marked by an increased and much more complete focus on what Krashen is really saying about how people acquire languages. They probably will never do that, at least not as long as they have the ties that I suspect they have with big business (see the three articles on “Who Runs ACTFL?”).
But if they could, it would mark the long awaited emergence of their group as a truly dynamic leader for language teachers instead of what they are now – a group with a marked corporate feel that puts political correctness over what is truly best for kids.
During this time spent talking to the ACTFL folks our own queue here has become jammed with all sorts of good articles from group members about how we can get better at comprehension based instruction. They need to get published and we need to get back to where our work is. So this is just to announce that I personally am returning my own focus here back to finding better and better classroom practices for our efforts with comprehensible input.