Brian Barabe raises two points below that could benefit from a variety of responses. I have not taught upper level TPRS to TPRS trained kids but somebody must be doing that and so can comment. Brian asks about the materials question as well. My answer to both questions is increasing output at the upper levels for TPRS trained kids – it is the logical outcome of massive input in the first two years. The writing and the speaking would really increase at the upper levels. Here are Brian’s thoughts:
Hey Ben,
I’m wondering what you see a third-year, and beyond, class being like IF students have had a solid two-year base through tprs. What will be the role of story telling, reading, literary choices, etc.?
I ask this since I don’t know first hand what a group of kids looks like in the last quarter of year two. I imagine a continuing need for lots of comprehensible input from the teacher via stories and from reading, but I’d like to know your experience and thoughts.
What prompted this quesion was that someone wanted the titles of good workbooks for third and fourth-year classes. I answered by naming two, but the very question bothered me. You could tell from the asker’s question that they were looking for something to keep the kids busy, IMHO. So I sent the following under the subject line, “Workbook: A Caution.”
Excuse the outrageous analogy, but I feel, after recommending Spanish Three Years, like someone buying a six pack for an alcoholic. Toning it down a little, I mean to say that I think we should be very cautious and very conscious about how and why we use a workbook like this one. If we study a grammar explanation with our classes and do one or two short exercises with them, perhaps we could think of this as extended pop up grammar (but of course it really isn’t). A workbook might help us focus on certain forms, hopefully those featured in a story or reading.
But let’s remember, one premise of workbooks is that you can learn the grammar of a language be isolating discreet features and thinking about them consciously. Put in terms of Krashen’s Monitor Theory, this is learning to apply grammatical features 1) when the learner knows them, 2) when they have time to think about them, 3) when that is their focus.
Here’s how it’s put in a Google article on Krashen:
According to Krashen, for the Monitor to be successfully used, three conditions must be met:
The acquirer/learner must know the rule.
This is a very difficult condition to meet because it means that the speaker must have had explicit instruction on the language form that he or she is trying to produce.
The acquirer must be focused on correctness.
He or she must be thinking about form, and it is difficult to focus on meaning and form at the same time.
The acquirer/learner must have time to use the monitor.
Using the monitor requires the speaker to slow down and focus on form.
Another premise of most workbooks is that lots of practice will bring about acquisition of the grammatical features. If that were true, Blaine, Joe, Valerie, Christine, and other pioneers of TPRS never would have been looking for something that worked better. Workbooks, at least the way they have been used for generations, don’t produce acquisition. Perhaps there is room in a TPRS curriculum for very, very, very judicious and brief uses of a workbook, but workbooks certainly aren’t “compelling, contextualized, and comprehensible.” (Carol Gaab’s three C’s)