We could sum up the first two articles in this series of posts on form and function in CI language instruction by saying that we have needed a CI curriculum that offers some kind of “form” within which to keep us “safe” as we speak to our students in the TL. We haven’t had that.
We have needed a curriculum that keeps us safe and provides strong but not too many guard rails for our auditory instruction. We want freedom and power and creativity within muscular structure. We want a 2021 Mercedes-AMG C63 S Coupe.
Too many guard rails (which term describes the current car wreck that has become the TPRS/CI world) strangle our creativity and lead us and our students quickly to boredom. Too few guard rails, on the other hand, leave us spinning around doing donuts on thin ice.
How do we achieve that balance? How do we achieve the right amount of guard rails so that our communicative input is neither too penned-in nor too out-of-control? How do we balance form and function in our CI instruction?
A good point to make here is that the original pioneers, especially Blaine Ray, easily reigned in the hard-to-control wild beast of random communication that defines human conversation. Blaine didn’t even need guard rails because he is Blaine Ray – a masterful communicator.
Everything Blaine did looked so easy – his pacing was always perfect, he seemed to have a sense of exactly what his students knew and what they didn’t know, and his conversation was pleasant, highly understandable and just wonderful.
Blaine could fabricate enjoyable human conversation in every class effortlessly. (Find a post on this topic of what human conversation actually is at the end of this article. It’s an important read in my opinion.
Teachers from traditional backgrounds were captivated by what they saw and flocked to workshops and conferences to study the shiny new car – now 25 years old with a lot of miles on it – but, after leaving and getting back into their classrooms, they couldn’t drive it. It was harder than it looked at the conferences. Why was this?
It’s because they didn’t have the structure, the form, or the right guard rails. Without having the structure they needed, their auditory input sucked. They thought the problem was them, which is categorically untrue. It was the monster that TPRS was becoming. So what did they do? They joined the party and started putting all sorts of artificial restrictions on CI. They had to slow the beast down!
Their first Faustian bargain* for stronger guard rails happened in 2002 when the people around Blaine (not Blaine himself – he didn’t need them) introduced the “three structures”. Doing that led them to go back to the textbook and the safety of word lists, and it has been all downhill from there.
Examples of associating CI with word lists are: semantic sets, thematic units, high frequency verb lists, lists of words that were needed to read a chapter in one of their largely ineffective little novels. (The new focus on reading and word lists also happened to extract a heavy price on the equity piece in the classroom, but that is another story.)
What was happening back then in those critical formative years for CI/TPRS of 2003-2005? They were trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, or, as it were, back into the textbook. They are still doing that and so if you have been to one of their trainings lately, it may explain why it didn’t work for you – because it can’t be done. CI and the textbook do not mix.
I remember after many of Susan Gross’ trainings people would ask her how to actually do what they had just seen her do, and she would say, “Just go do it! Try it out!”
But it was too tall an order and most people couldn’t do it. They dismissed CI. I don’t blame them. They didn’t have the balance between form and function that we are discussing in these posts.
So they invented the three structures (too much form) in 2002-2003 (and of “circling” in 2005 – also too much form) as discussed above and then after 2005 they started focusing on selling readers/chapter books (too much form) and they have never looked back.
The money grab had begun and they are still grabbing money and it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to them to be continuously leaving the research in the hallway. As a result, the CI movement is in free fall right now and Krashen has not been staunch enough in defending and illustrating his work as it has slowly eroded under the new CI leadership . (No blame! Without SK we would have nothing, and it shouldn’t even be his job to defend his work. He gave us the research. But where are the people pointing out that CI is and has not been in alignment with Krashen’s work since the early 2000s?)
It has really been the excessive focus on the novels/readers – esp. at level 1 – that was the beginning of the end for TPRS. Those little readers were so profitable that they pulled the entire focus of the CI movement away from where it should be – on how the auditory piece interfaces with the reading piece. Why?
It is because the focus on delivering high quality auditory CI in level 1 seems to have been forgotten. Too much money in the novels. Now there is not enough balance of form and function in CI and no current curriculums – stuffed into traditional teaching methods as CI is now – make the auditory piece come alive. (I put my vote on my StarChart™ curriculum as a new muscle car but that is also another story.)
So most current CI students in the classes of well-meaning and otherwise capable CI teachers have had their noses stuck in those little books for far too many instructional minutes during each class period, especially at level 1 where auditory CI should be the only CI element truly at center stage.
The reading piece should follow and never upstage auditory input, but it is now. So everyone to this day – almost 20 years now since Pobre Ana first appeared – is feverishly trying to create and sell more readers.
Putting the “reading carriage” in front of the “auditory input horse” was bad.
*I guess it’s not a true Faustian bargain. Most teachers didn’t know that what they were doing in pulling TPRS back into the textbook was 100% against the research.