L mentioned in a recent email (I’ll soon get that into blog entry form) that she felt overwhelmed that we do so much. How can we fit all of the CI discussion, PQA, stories, reading, writing, dictation, and (more recently) culture lessons into one week?
Let’s take a look at the history. (Please note that this just my opinion of how things have shaken out):
Right up until about 2005 the basic format was TPRS and when we learned about new things we learned them from Blaine or Susie or Jason or Carol and most of the new stuff (circling, mainly, along with the evolution of the three steps between 2000 and 2005) we grasped within the context of our main focus – learning how to tell stories. Some started using the term storyasking later but it’s the same thing. We were primarily focused on learning how to tell stories, how to get ourselves understood to our kids in interesting and meaningful ways so that they would not be wasting their time hearing English in the classroom.
Naturally, because of Krashen’s influence and with Blaine’s guidance, we also learned how to turn stories into readings, and listening and reading were the two primary skills we focused on. We eschewed writing and speaking at the earlier levels of study because we agreed with Krashen that they are output skills that can only flow out of competence in listening and reading, the input skills. We did that because we know that a language learner can’t write or speak it (output it) unless they know what it sounds like and what it looks like first. We did this in spite of the fact that it pissed off a lot of our colleagues. Friendships were ruined. Rival camps got set up, even within the TPRS movement. Principals, others, drew totally false conclusions about what we were doing.We accepted that nothing great could happen without conflict, and we moved on.
We knew that writing could be turned into a technical exercise, and had been for many decades, but we didnt want to teach that way anymore, knowing that few of our students possessed the chess mind intelligence needed to stay with that kind of boring learning for long. We saw our colleagues continue to push the output skills with beginning students, perhaps under the influence of the book companies. But we knew that they were putting the cart before the horse, we saw the results or egregious lack thereof in their classsrooms. We saw their diminished enrollments and loss of jobs. We didn’t want any part of language instruction that refused to accept Krashen’s monumental premise that language learning is an unconscious process.
We kept our fascination up with Blaine Ray for that reason – he had found a way to make kids focus on the meaning of the language and not on the medium itself. He had found a way to apply Krashen’s research in the classroom. It was easy to diss because it sounded so silly, the way he did it, with bizarre stories and all of that. Few times in the history of education was a visionary so misunderstood by the masses.
High school teachers flatly rejected it on the grounds that it was for kids, with plastic ducks and such, and middle school teachers said that it was too hard to do for their kids. University professors planted their heads firmly (in the sand) and refused to recognize something that was, viewed in the light of intellectual honesty, not going to go away if for no other reason that kids who were taught with properly presented TPRS loved it and learned a ton and were actually able to show far greater results than their cognitively taught counterparts.
It was so difficult! But we persisted. How could we go back to a model that we knew didn’t work? We were stuck. Many of us were jeered by those among us who didn’t want to upset the status quo. But we kept to our vision of a better way. Susan and Jason and Carol and Karen and Diana went up to the front lines and yelled at us to follow them. Krashen would come to our conferences and, more each year, tell us that what we were doing was in more alignment with his work than anything else out there. We had turned to Krashen out of complete frustration that so few (4% is the national statistic) of students completed four years, and many of them failed the AP exam at the end of that exhaustive period of study. It was an exciting time. We felt a rumble in the earth.
So things weren’t too complicated around 2005. It was hard stuff for us to learn, but since Susan Gross was as clear as a person could be in illustrating and defining all of this, especially circling, we dutifully went to our national conferences and, by hard work and many emails to each other, we got a handle on it. We saw Linda Li teach us months worth of Mandarin in a few days. Likewise, we were able to learn a substantial amount of Russian from Katya Paukova in the space of less than a week. Donna Tatum-Johns made it all crystal clear to us at those workshops. Janice Holter Kittock got things going in the Minnesota/Wisconsin area, and soon entire regions of the country were alive with discussion, argumentation and innovation.
I’m probably forgetting a lot of people, but all of those people, each of them in their own way, was a warrior acting with great courage on the battlefield of inertia that has characterized our profession for over a century. We tried it. So many of us quit. A ton, nailed by the shrapnel of the battlefield. A few didn’t get hit, and found a kind of happiness on the battlefield that defies description – being happy in a classroom with 35 hormone cases and making it not a struggle, but fun.
Those of us who didn’t quit, right about bewteen 2005 and 2008, began to implement what Blaine and Susie were saying about circling, and Blaine’s Read and Discuss technique proved to be a great way to do a CI class. During those years, a tidal wave of interest in Krashen and reading was unleashed. The key but slippery concept of personalization, as well, became a prime factor, as we realized that, when the kids could be made to feel that they were important, contributing members in our classrooms, with hilarious names and wonderfully weird identities, things were easy to make interesting and meaningful to them. So we started doing stories and readings with lots and lots of different personalizing techniques. Again, a lot of us quit. It was too hard. But a lot of us were hanging in there. Waking up a lot at night, getting into ridiculous fights with colleagues, dying emotionally, but we hung in there.
During this time, some limited minutes during the week were allocated to output in the form of writing. We did, and had been doing all along, free writes. They were and remain gold for teaching writing. Kids were able to express ideas surprisingly well with very limited practice in writing, and that writing aligned perfectly with the ACTF guidelines, which state clearly that accurate spelling of verbs and such is truly and magnificently a thing of the frozen past. Maybe our kids’ grammar wasn’t perfect, but the kids trained with only grammar and no comprehensible input couldn’t write any better than ours in spite of spending at least fifty times more instructional time per year doing so.
In the past few years, starting perhaps in 2009, the big argument about output in the form of writing in early level classes heated up. I had been sneaking dictation into my lessons in spite of Susie’s protestations that it was output too early. Later, I felt more comfortable about it (and still do) as the kids continued to respond so positively to it, and as many colleagues told me that it was very effective in their classes. In truth, dictation is not purely output at all, but incorporates reading and listening as well. Still, I limited dictation, if for no other reason than that I was running into a time crunch and, firmly grounded in the principle that input completely trumps output in the early levels in any Krashen-based classroom, I stayed with input.
Speaking. Another form of output. What about forced speaking? That got ugly in the last year and a half, and I still stick to my guns that if a child doesn’t actually want to say something, they shouldn’t have to. That topic is just too much to go into here. Lately, I have been tempering that opinion just a bit, with choral output by the class (letting my superstars motormouth in L2 all they want, those who are ready) and other little techniques that have some degree of charm, but, in the end, speaking is output and should occur naturally as a result of massive amounts of input, because speaking is a supremely complex unconscious process that is light years beyond the ability of any one single teacher to create it by cute little output exercises.
Now, for the fifth wheel. Culture. Not until Paul Kirschling of Thomas Jefferson High School here in Denver started preparing his presentation last year for the Los Alamitos conference on how to blend CI with the teaching of culture, did I really get how to teach culture in my CI classroom. I need to ask Paul to maybe put a permanent link on this site to his presentation – maybe he will. Of course, we must mention Jason Fritze’s work in this area as well. His Reader’s Theatre, unveiled in Los Alamitos and punctuated that week by awesome modeling of the idea by both Jason and Gayle Trager, is a cannon shot on how to teach culture (need to blog on that for about a week because I think that is the hottest new idea in CI right now and we should be doing a lot of it in our classrooms this year – all those who were in Los Alamitos would agree, I am sure).
It all adds up to the fact that we have put a lot of baggage on our CI boat these past five years – all of the above stuff plus other stuff like getting students to write their own stories instead of using story scripts, working more and more and more and more with personalization (it can never be too much), using pictures to generate CI, etc. We got some rules together that really work for us, so we started to get a serious handle on classroom discipline, which was vital for all of this to actually work. We figured out ways to save large amounts of instructional time and keep our lives simple by giving little quizzes at the end of our classes. Some of us learned how to write our own kick ass story scripts, because of Anne Matava’s teaching. We took many dead end roads that led nowhere, like the Realm, but we always came back and got on the main road.
So that, whereas before 2005 we pretty much focused on listening and reading in the form of stories and Blaine’s books with a minimum focus on the output skills, we now have moved more deeply into the life giving waters of personalization and into making the teaching of culture in the target language come alive.
So where do we stand now, in 2010? Have we moved away from TPRS as Blaine teaches it? I don’t think so. He knew from studying Krashen that language acquisition, being an unconscious process, is best done with massive early input being presented in the form of listening and reading so that the student is unaware that they are even acquiring the language, being focused so much on the message and not its medium. That hasn’t changed and never should – it’s the core pillar of the whole thing.
I don’t think we have moved that far, at all, actually. People are calling what Blaine invented by different names. Maybe all the new stuff is just some of the icing on the infinitely large cake that Krashen and Blaine baked for us. But the master bakers were Stephen and Blaine. The personalization will continue to evolve. Our classrooms will not be tombs any more. More students will be reached, all students, and the Achievement Gap will be dealt a body blow, one richly deserved. Classes will get bigger and bigger at higher levels. The four percenters, usually white females, in AP classes will be a thing of the past, as will, ultimately, the dog thing that is the AP exam. The culture piece will continue to get bigger now with Paul and Jason, with apologies to any others who have pioneered in this area. I am now finally understanding and implementing entire L2 classes on the history of French piracy in the Carribean, history of Haiti, which will allow me to later set up some classes on Toussaint L’Ouverture, which will lead my sophomores to Napoleon in the next few years, etc. I think Paul told me once that he thought it was possible to create an entire system of CI instruction around the teaching of culture. If we did that we would certainly take a lot less heat from those who think that storytelling is all about silly animals and all of that – which it certainly is not but they don’t understand that.
I don’t know where it’s going. I am certainly omitting huge parts of the history of all of this, but I don’t want to write a book about it, and it would probably be inaccurate anyway, because those who know the entire history back to the 1980’s of what we have experienced are few indeed (they are welcome to correct and comment on any inaccuracies above). I think it’s all going in the direction of teaching less stories – which are so hard to get going and one is never sure if a story is going to work – and more culture, with more and more reading. All via the TGV that we call Comprehensible Input. Always with more reading and talking about what we are reading (so easy to do).
I do know one thing – where I used to hate my job and everything about it, I now love it (the teaching part). I feel that the approach works for me to reach all the kids in the room. That sure wasn’t happening before! I like to laugh at the things that they say. I could teach a class from one sentence for hours. I really enjoy teaching kids languages now.