Where did the fears around building stories come from? They originated in the early days of TPRS when Blaine Ray could and did create a story with seemingly no effort, but nobody else could. Any TPRS old-timers reading this know exactly what I mean.
It got so bad that whenever people showed up at a national conference in the halcyon days of TPRS around 2005-2010 they were told simply – by people who really didn’t know – to simply just go watch Blaine teach at the conference and then go back to their classrooms and Be Blaine. That was the term….
But that conflicted with a basic premise in my own concept of what being a language teacher means and what is in my opinion the deepest tenet of good teaching – Be Yourself. It’s the old terms that Moco Loco Thompson coined back in 1999 on the old TPRS listserve – “individual teaching artist”.
Now we can finally understand why TPRS and now the current version of CI have gone off the tracks. TPRS became a cult of personality and thus was created the myth that storytelling as a way of teaching language was “too hard”, causing countless teachers – after trying and of course failing at it because they didn’t have a method – to immediately give up on it and run straight back to the textbook.
To those people I say, “Have hope! Stay with the research. Never abandon the research. Stay with the Communication Standard and you will see something.”