More from Claire on targetless instruction in TPRS. It is revolutionary. A few items that I find truly powerful are highlighted in orange, so that was me that did that. I’m just going to keep this thread going. For me it rings true and gets to the marrow of the issue of what is plaguing people with TPRS, and explains why they can’t get it to work for them in their classrooms:
Krashen said it first and said it best: i+1. That’s the key to learning languages. But in 1979, bilingual educator Jim Cummins came along and identified the “recipe” for providing i+1 across varying proficiencies. He stated that if you teach beginning language learners (in the grand scheme of bilingualism, almost all foreign language is “beginning” except for the highest levels, think last semester, AP French IV) you need “cognitively undemanding and context embedded” language. For beginning language learners, Cummin’s theories claim we must lighten the cognitive load, as well as their linguistic burden.
TPRS does provide “cognitively undemanding” language, but in negative correlation to the focus on form – vocabulary targets or grammar targets.
TPRS with targets is more linguistically demanding because you are not interested and therefore have a lower tolerance for language “noise” that you don’t understand. Also, TPRS with targets becomes “cognitively demanding” when your focus is on form (the need to use the right targets) especially if you target late-acquired grammar.
TPRS without targets is superior; no wrong or right, only creating. Creating is higher order thinking, but not exactly. We activate and employ our schema to make deep and lasting connections. But we pull from our schema as we chose. If we decide our character is going to be a red dog, and we can’t come up with a name for it, we can just call him after our favorite cartoon character or our pet or whatever pops into or heads. It’s familiar and funny and uniquely ours and we’ll remember it. We’ve made a connection and can recall this word from our schema more readily, more fluently. But we didn’t wrack our brains with whether it’s wrong or right.
And then targets happen. And we have to remember wrong and right. Sometimes just for a test (not good). Sometimes for the whole lesson because the lesson got derailed by a desire to “teach” targets.
TPRS in any form is still preferable to almost any other method out there. With most TPRS, we will get support with visuals or go point and slow (we also get to use L1, which my students’ couldn’t use without pre-planned targets). We stay within the boarder realm of social language (BICS, Cummin’s quartiles 1-2).
Yet, when we focus on “teaching” targets…depending on how challenging the targets are (grammar being more challenging; simple HFW being less challenging) students don’t get the fullest extent of the “cognitively undemanding” as is possible.
To recap: the greater the focus on wrong/right through used of targets for targets sake, the less the interest, higher the affective filter, the higher the linguistic burden, and the higher the cognitive burden when we are forced to produce or respond to the “correct” target.
As much as I hate to use this word, it’s enough to make students “breakdown.”