The problem in CI has always been that big gap, alluded to in the previous post, between what Blaine and Susie and Jason and the other super stars of the movement could do and what novice CI teachers could do.
There was such a big disconnect between what the original reformers and innovators who had all gathered around Blaine in the early days 20 years ago were doing and what the average textbook trained teacher who herself was raised on worksheets were doing even after being “trained in CI”.
In order to protect themselves from this big new BLAST OF CREATIVITY that had rained stars and much-needed light down onto our slumbering profession, a blast that actually aligned with the research and the Communication Standard, most of the traditional teachers held their flame shields up to the young TPRS movement and blocked it. How? They began absorbing it into the textbook.
It was just to protect themselves. No blame. They were stunned by the power of the new way of teaching and couldn’t do it any more than a professor of physics could teach a class in AP biology. That’s a weak analogy however. Physics and AP Biology are actually real classes. WL classes based on worksheets and the textbook are not real classes.
And verb phiffing was so new to the traditionalists that they just couldn’t wrap their minds around how simple it is to phiff a verb. One would think that a language teacher, of all people, would embrace verb phiffing as a process quite natural to the instructional process….
But, with the genie out of the bottle, the traditionalists still had to somehow appear that they were aligning with the research. CI was scorching egos across the country.
One good TPRS teacher could put pressure on dozens of teachers in their district simply by the way their students reacted with such enthusiasm to their instruction. The pressure kept building and the past 15 years have been characterized by serious infighting within departments.
The traditionalists have won.
CI instruction was forced into a blender and was quickly sliced and diced into fragments. The traditional methods – mainly the memorization of word lists by their students – were the blender. Who needed a balance of curricular form and function when the textbook was there to keep order?
The CI people, most of them anyway, retreated into the safety of those doltish little novels.
Slice it. Dice it. Water it down. Keep the old guidelines and curriculums in place.
Even ACTFL was in on it (protecting the old ways) and embarrassed themselves on a daily basis over those years. That massive failure by ACTFL might be the subject of another series of articles, but probably not. We’ll just file ACTFL’s abysmal leadership performance over the past 20 years under the heading of “Dumb Moves in WL Instruction”.
There has been no “getting to yes”. There has been no “let’s put our heads together in our profession and figure this Krashen thing out”.
The blind reactionary movement to absorb TPRS/CI into the textbook hasn’t gone well, since the two ways of teaching are polar opposites in many ways, but that also will have to be studied and commented on at another time, perhaps in a new book I am working on called “In Defense of CI”.
I do have a meeting with the Denver Public Schools’ WL Coordinator, Diana Noonan on Nov. 12th. I will ask her why her district isn’t doing better with CI. After all, DPS was the original flagship district for Blaine’s original testing of TPRS. Krashen used to come here all the time.
Diana won’t like the question, but I think it’s justified. The TPRS/CI movement is going to have to take off its rose-colored glasses at some point. I’ll report back here on what I find out from Diana.