I can’t think of a better reason to go through the insanity of teaching languages than the one about uplifting ourselves and others. And what is the best way of teaching languages that uplifts us and our students the most? It’s through comprehensible input based storytelling, everybody agrees on that these days.
We don’t hear a lot of excited conversations in our buildings or online where people are talking about how wonderful it is to teach object pronoun agreement and verb conjugations….teachers who still do that are increasingly reaching the point in the river where the river ends and the waterfall begins and down they go, dinosaurs bobbing in the water and now finally falling into the depths of bad-ideas-in-language teaching that lasted way too long.
Now, 25 years after Blaine Ray set about consciously to design a way of teaching languages that is fully based on the best research out there that is still the best research and that has never been refuted, i.e. the work of Chomsky and Terrell and Krashen and Mason and Wong and the other comprehensible input gurus, we have storytelling.
And what kind of storytelling? For me it’s the cool kind where we don’t target and circle and test and force learning on the students – what in my opinion TPRS has become? In my view the best way to deliver CI to our students – in my opinion – is via non-targeted stories and working from images instead of word lists as discussed in detail here and in ANATS and ANATTY over the past year.