Someone asked me how I am different from TPRS. Here is what I wrote back:
It’s a messy business, but I know that since I made the shift away from TPRS, I am much happier in my work. This is not true for everyone, but it is true for me. In January of 2016 I – in quite serendipitous fashion – uncovered a system of teaching languages that I feel is very much more specific than TPRS, much less haphazard and therefore much easier to do, and which more closely aligns with the soul of the research. In short, what I am doing is based on making images and not instructing from a list of words connected to a “curriculum”.
To me the curriculum is the language and so everything I do is almost entirely based on the Three Modes of Communication of ACTFL, especially the Interpersonal Skill, which comprises 65% of my assessment process. I’m sad that my TPRS colleagues have turned it into a competition to learn certain words when the research clearly states that that can’t be ordered, that it occurs in a natural way that is different in each student depending on how they are wired, and that taking tests on word lists requires memorization, which is thinking, which has nothing to do with what the research says.
Oh hell I could write about this forever. Suffice to say that TPRS doesn’t work for me. It never really did.