Blaine’s brilliant idea to create the storytelling method out of the clay of Krashen’s research was met head on by school policy, esp. by the targeting of lists of words, in the way textbooks are designed. This was a high speed collision between his new car and the old traditional car. Which car won?
Judging by all the hassle new people have had with TPRS, the old car can be said to have won. It left a big mark on the new car, at the least. It was the mark of targeted comprehensible input instruction. No blame. The old institution had to survive in the same way any organism would fight back against an invader.
But then everybody started thinking that the new way of CI instruction, the way it began to be done in schools, the post car wreck version, was actually the original version. They even convinced themselves that the new version was an accurate and capable version of Krashen’s ideas.
This illusion was fueled by no rebuttal from Krashen. He said it all happened that way because schools are based on curriculums, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Blaine said essentially the same thing. Russ Albright addresses this point with eloquence in the Primers section above, the first article in the list.
If Blaine’s original version of TPRS is to one day function in schools, if the car is to be successfully repaired and look like it hadn’t been in a wreck, if comprehensible input instruction is to one day truly reflect Krashen and Beniko Mason’s research and honor it, then we are all going to have to cool it with the targets and loosen up the lists, thematic units, semantic sets versions of TPRS. It will be like having the dents hammered out of the car. Can we do it?
On a personal note, one reason I wrote books on the method was to try to understand it. I knew that the method contained gold, but then over the years when I went to teach a story, things mostly sputtered and made me feel frustrated because I expected better, because the research was so promising.
I felt so wrung out at the end of a day of stories, and more confused about the method than ever, and that lasted fifteen years. I wrote the books because I learn by writing. It was a way of denying what my great and true mentor Susan Gross kept telling me: “Ben, just talk to the kids”. I didn’t trust her enough.
Then in India last year I mustered up some trust and dropped targets altogether after yet another lackluster semester of doing it in the post car wreck way. I didn’t drop the Matava scripts, however, but that’s another story. In January I started teaching from images created by the students, and certain students jobs that I had been using for at least ten years but in a new way, while asking questions in a certain way, and suddenly last spring at the American Embassy School in New Delhi I felt that I had been let out of a garbage can.
Perhaps if all the experts let go of their expertise they would stop confusing people. Theirs is an expertise based on what TPRS has become in schools. I say we need to get our teaching back to Krashen, but fully and not kind of. The mixture of pure comprehensible input instruction and the school version of TPRS is just too hard for most people to wrap their heads around, let alone successfully apply in their classrooms with real students. Again, no blame. It is the way schools have become.
It is rare that teachers succeed in implementing the post car wreck of TPRS. One cannot serve two masters. It breaks teachers in half and makes them unjustly feel that they cannot succeed at teaching using comprehensible input. That is why 75% of attendees at the national conferences are new people each year. People go to a conference, try it, and too often fail. Especially when they are alone in their schools with no support and must experience outright raw hostility from their own departments and administrators and, very often, students. They understandably give up their hopes in order to keep their jobs.