We must look at what our students really would want as they come into our classrooms each day. They do not come in wanting to learn the language. That comes later. They first come in wanting to feel included. Therefore, we must learn ways to talk about our students in ways that draw them in. We must learn what they want to talk about.
One thing is certain after these first three decades of TPRS. Our students do not come into our classrooms each day wanting to supply cute answers to a story that they may or may not be interested in, that has been hijacked by the five to seven fastest and most extroverted students in the classroom, so that the majority of the students in the classroom feel “less than” during the process of the creation of the story.
Of course, being excluded by the teacher in favor of a small group of students who drive the story is nothing new to them. Students who are naturally introverted or slower processors but are asked to become by some magical process an extrovert in their language class are asked to do that in most if not all of their classes. It is a lose-lose situation for so many of them as we in the U.S. continue to allow the concept of competition to reign over that of cooperation in our school buildings. It seems that it has always been so.