Kristi Lentz Taylor poses a question that I’ve never heard before. Hopefully we can shed some light on it:
I am a homeschool TPRS teacher new to the group. In one of my homeschool teaching settings, a colleague in the home (housecleaner) is a skilled and trained teacher in her home country in Honduras. I learn a ton from her and she is a dear friend. However, we have some quite different teaching philosophies: She is convinced I need to do top-down, didactic instruction on forms like gender/articles and written accent marks in order to properly teach Spanish. I, of course, as a CI/TPRS teacher, am coming from a different perspective. (I’m open to “focus on form” as per Long (1997) but not the traditional “focus on forms” that she is advocating.) I can draw on research supporting TPRS/CI, but most of this is done by people identified as U.S./Euro-based. For me to cite this in support of my pedagogy feels like yet one more instance of representatives of dominant imperial cultures (U.S./Euro) telling people from other cultures that what they’re doing/how they’re teaching is wrong. So my question is: Does anyone know of research in SLA supporting TPRS/CI being promulgated by academics in Spanish-language target cultures? Preferably in Latin America?
Thank you in advance for your help!