Warning – long post:
I received an email from Blaine’s publisher, Contee Seely, in which he says:
“I would like to hear or read your opinion about a significant question. Below you have this in the signature of your email:
…it is very hard to create compelling messages when the hidden agenda is the relative clause….
– Stephen Krashen
“This quote is from his paper “The Case for Non-Targeted Comprehensible Input: The Net Hypothesis”, in which he is advocating avoiding focusing on form.
“In the Scripts books (Matava) you suggest using and repeating specific phrases and teaching 3 tenses at once (at least for French & Spanish, I assume you mean). These suggestions have me thinking that you may not totally agree with Krashen on the question of whether ever to focus on form or not.
“I’m currently working with him on the revision of his little book Foreign Language Education the Easy Way. He makes this same point to me, saying that he thinks it is harmful to focus on form since it makes it more difficult to make the content interesting or compelling, and that if enough CI is provided, the “grammatical aspects” will be acquired without being focused on.
“My current opinion is that consciously avoiding focusing on grammatical form may in fact have the opposite effect at times, that it may sometimes make it more difficult to provide enough interesting or compelling content. In TPRS it is common practice to focus on form and it doesn’t seem to impede creativity, interest or acquisition. Perhaps it does on occasion. One factor may be what grammatical features one chooses to focus on. Some teachers may have a better sense of what features to focus on at any given moment. No matter what one does, there are bound to be occasions when things don’t go swimmingly.
“Very important in this question is what is enough CI. Teachers have so little time to provide enough CI that it seems necessary to pay attention to form, especially to certain grammatical features.
“I value your opinion. One significant thing that is lacking in Krashen’s approach to this and other questions is that he is not a language teacher and, so, doesn’t have the hands-on experience of a language teacher. I have heard him say that (some) teachers have the experience that he lacks and that their effective practices are more important than his opinion. I think he was talking about Blaine in particular.
“What say you? I could call you or skype you to talk about this if you’d rather communicate about this via voice instead of email.”
Contee
Hey Contee. Here are my ramblings:
You said:
…in the Scripts books you suggest using and repeating specific phrases and teaching 3 tenses at once (at least for French & Spanish, I assume you mean). These suggestions have me thinking that you may not totally agree with Krashen on the question of whether ever to focus on form or not….
Contee, in order to make CI work, we in schools have had to learn how to “repeat three phrases and teach 3 tenses”. We don’t need to do that with small children in natural settings, obviously, but in schools the CI train needs tracks. I don’t think of focusing on those tracks and tenses as focusing on grammatical from, however. I try never to focus on grammatical form anymore in my use of comprhensible input. The stories needed to have tracks, that’s all. It’s because it’s in a school.
Yes, I have always fully agreed with Krashen that we should never focus on grammatical form, but to repeat – as a teacher, that doesn’t apply in schools. Krashen’s theories when applied to schools undergo a tremendous mashing, mainly because of the far more limited time we have with CI in schools and also by a second factor, unmotivated students who, as cyborgs, interact much better with machines than they do with people.
Therefore, having in schools a fraction of the time necessary to do CI, and having human beings who barely act like human beings, such has their ability to communicate reciprocally with a teacher and others been destroyed by the experience we call school and by hand held electronics, are two factors that really turn this discussion on its end.
You said:
…I’m currently working with him on the revision of his little book Foreign Language Education the Easy Way. He makes this same point to me, saying that he thinks it is harmful to focus on form since it makes it more difficult to make the content interesting or compelling, and that if enough CI is provided, the “grammatical aspects” will be acquired without being focused on….
As I said, that is what I think personally. But what I personally think doesn’t matter – I am a teacher in a school. What Krashen says is, for me, the exact truth about how we acquire languages, but not how we acquire languages in schools for the two reasons I pointed to above, the lack of time needed and the lack of motivated students.
My position after over ten years with CI and over thirty five years in classrooms is that Krashen’s theories cannot be successfully applied in schools, and that most of the teachers now tearing their hair out to make TPRS work in their classrooms will fail.
You said:
…my current opinion is that consciously avoiding focusing on grammatical form may in fact have the opposite effect at times, that it may sometimes make it more difficult to provide enough interesting or compelling content….
In my opinion, this depends entirely on who your students are. Yes, you can embellish the focus on form if you have intellectually privileged and motivated students and lots and lots of time. But who has those two things? I certainly don’t. My mostly undocumented Latino kids never mastered the grammatical aspects of their first language.
Teachers are failing, have failed, with TPRS for so long precisely because they lack those two factors – enough time with their students and kids who are intellectually privileged enough to even want to look at a grammar point in a CI classroom.
Krashen did his research on ELL kids, a decidely more motivated group than what we get in required WL courses in schools. And if it is true, as Malcom Gladwell has said in Outliars, that we need 10,000 hours for mastery of anything when we teachers only get a lousy 500 hours in a four year school program, half of which might realistically be devoted to real CI instruction, then the factors of motivated kids and enough time completely demolish the chance for CI to actually bring any results in a typical American classroom, where kids have lost their way almost completely anyway. (Leon Botstein, the President of Bard University has said, “The American high school is obsolete”.)
So there is Krashen in the real world and Krashen in schools. Two different things. One is highly accurate in describing what happens in real life when people gain fluency as a part of normal everyday life, and the other is a hopeless thing because of factors that only teachers who have tried to do TPRS know.
Only this year has my online PLC created and field tested together a way of instilling discipline and “motivation” in the cyborgs that actually makes CI work in the classroom, one that truly addresses the motivation issue, but nothing can address the time point, so what’s the use?
Most teachers just don’t get that we acquire langages unconsciously. I have spoken with Krashen about this. He can’t figure it out. He tells all these teachers all over the world that the human mind can only gain fluency when it is focused on the message and not the words, and it just doesn’t register with them.
So these three factors, lack of motivated students, the time issue, and the fact that most teachers seem unable to even grasp the most important feature of comprehensible input, that it must be an unconscious process, all add up to a big zero in what can be done in American classrooms.
Now, there are a few highly gifted teachers out there, and more young ones every day, and I am privileged to work with them every day, who will have none of what I am saying here and are going full blast with great results in making CI really work in their classrooms. But such teachers are rare. The system in schools is full of rotting teachers who will never begin to grasp what Krashen is saying. I am confident that with time the effect of the work these powerful young teachers are doing will be felt, but I am speaking now about the time we are in now, not thirty years from now. Those teachers are going to “bring it”, no doubt. But back to the present:
You said:
…in TPRS it is common practice to focus on form and it doesn’t seem to impede creativity, interest or acquisition. Perhaps it does on occasion….
Well, here we need to focus on what we mean by focusing on form. There is the focus on form via pop up grammar (limited to 4 sec.). I don’t do that anymore, and it’s not just because my Latino students have no L1, it’s also because pop up grammar really doesn’t work. We don’t do pop up grammar with four year olds. I do a teensy bit, ok, but I don’t feel it has much value. I do it because I love grammar, actually.
This is where I start to zero in on a better answer to your question. I think that by suggesting that we focus more on form, you are hoping that you can speed up acquisition a bit. And it may be true.
But I think it would be true only for the intellectually privileged and motivated students I mentioned above. If I were to add slightly heftier doses of focus on grammatical form in my own classes, which Krashen has visited, it wouldn’t work. I think that with this idea you are trying to cheat a bit, ignoring the fact that we need thousands of hours and don’t have them, to maybe speed up acquisition a bit via a bit more focus on grammatical form.
But just think about my kids here in Denver at Lincoln. That won’t work. They are so busy working two jobs or watching siblings that few come to school much at all. They spend most of their time trying to figure out problems most of us can’t even imagine.
When did the focus on grammatical form begin in CI classes? You were right in the middle of that fifteen years ago. As I understand it, Krashen figured out that we learn languages unconsciously with no focus on any grammatical targets at all. Then Blaine tried it but within a few years TPRS had become structured, a victim of being in a system, a school, that DEMANDED a focus on form, and so TPRS was born.
Blaine came up with target structures. It looked more like school then. And then as the years went by people realized the role and power of reading and Diana especially here in Denver started focusing more and more and more on targeting vocabulary in novels by creating stories to give the necessary repetitions for acquisition so that the novels could be read. Great. Blaine made CI work in schools by focusing on target structures to set up stories. Going to conferences became almost a professional sport, where teachers witnessed stories in action, and went back to their schools and went splat and mostly right back to the safety of the book.
I just say again that except for those few gifted teachers, TPRS can’t and won’t work in schools.
You said,
…one factor may be what grammatical features one chooses to focus on. Some teachers may have a better sense of what features to focus on at any given moment. No matter what one does, there are bound to be occasions when things don’t go swimmingly….
No one will figure out the “right amount” of “the right” features. It won’t work. That is the Natural Order hypothesis.
You said:
…consciously avoiding focusing on grammatical form may in fact have the opposite effect at times, that it may sometimes make it more difficult to provide enough interesting or compelling content….
Now we are talking about more than pop-up grammar, the 4 sec. kind, here, right? I mean, I hear in what you are saying that you don’t want to just zip through a grammar point in four seconds, as has been taught to new people for so long now. I hear you saying that a more lush, a more significant foray into the form of the language during class, might help the comprehensible input. That is quite a thought!
So, let’s say we are teaching a class and we decide to do it, to delve deeper than four seconds. We go beyond Susie’s definition of pop up grammar as to simply say, “this means that” and go on. Let’s say we go deeper and say, “Look how wonderful this verb tense looks when written. You (students) already know that when I put my thumb over my shoulder that it means the action is over, it happened in the past, but let’s go deeper into it now for about a minute.” Then we focus more on the form, perhaps explaining briefly the difference between one kind of past being an event and another being a non-event.
As a grammar teacher of 24 years and an AP teacher who takes my grammar seriously, I can tell you that in my experience in the three schools I’ve used CI in, I immediately lose most of my students when I do that. Gifted or not. They don’t care. Another sigificant thing happens – the net that I worked so hard to set up in the class gets shredded as I lurch the kids out of the whole brain/unconscious mind activity that we were in so that all of a sudden we are all THINKING together ABOUT some form of the language.
So that is a big deal – this shifting away from the unconscious focus on meaning and onto the words. Isn’t this is what you are asking my opinion on – what kind of focus on grammar? How much? When? Those questions are certainly handled by different teachers in different ways. My kids at Lincoln don’t even speak much Engish, so I NEVER focus on form with them. I don’t even do pop ups.
BUT what if I were in with a bunch of superstars? Then I would focus on form and probably to a fault because those kind of kids always seem happiest when triumphant over complex aspects of grammatical form. For those kids in the suburbs, that’s all they know. So up comes the pluperfect subjunctive. Then school becomes school and Krashen’s work (was it designed for schools? Can it even work in schools?) is out the window.
All that rambling to say, Contee, that the best response I can give you is that for me the answer is connected in some way to the audience. Krashen’s work is all about how we learn, and he certainly never did the research thinking of how we learn languages in schools, which is so different, and I did my best to touch on that above. Nor did he even do his work for us in World Languages, but for ELA, with all those weird subtle differences between the two.
You said this:
…very important in this question is what is enough CI. Teachers have so little time to provide enough CI that it seems necessary to pay attention to form, especially to certain grammatical features….
Yes, if you are looking for results. I have learned not to look for results. I am sufficiently overwhelmed by the process that Krashen describes as an UNCONSICOUS one that I dare not think about it. Now it really gets complicated because when you ask “what is enough” CI you immediately get caught up in that problem that there is never remotely enough CI in schools. Yes, out of schools there is enough CI – those years that result in fluency – all those years. But in schools? No. There is not remotely enough CI. So you are thinking maybe if we focused a bit more on grammatical form we could push the ball that is rolling at its own pace to fluency a bit faster, in effect cheating a bit. But that takes us back to what school we are in. So my response to your question is that yes we should perhaps speed the ball up with a focus on grammatical form but only in classrooms with highly motivated kids with good work ethics who know how CI works and who have the personal qualities to make it work in tandem with the instructor and who are not motivated by grades or seeking in some subtle way to wrestle control over the classroom from the teacher.
We should indeed talk about this. It’s such a jumble to try to write down. The factors we need to discuss in detail are whether Krashen’s work applies in schools, where kids have devolved into cyborgs and therefore CI is already pissed on before the class starts, and also we need to focus on this idea of privilege as being a factor in speeding up acquisition by forcing more on grammatical form. So complex!
What I do is focus on the scenery as the CI train rolls down the tracks. I don’t focus on form at all. Diana and everybody around here in Denver knows it and leaves me alone. I have never understood how focusing on form can prevent a kind of drain on the content of the lesson. It’s a very difficult thing to express.
We need SOME form, don’t we, but in the way a train needs tracks to keep from going off into the sand. And we only need that focus on form in schools. Most human conversation has the quality, because we are humans, of being compelling all the time. (Once we can speak it and read it really well, after years, we can focus on form all we want.)
But we only need focus on form in schools. That is the best image I can think of to express it. Compelling, free form, input that is sparked by human things and based on three structures, if you want to call that form or not, is the way I roll. That is why when Anne writes a story I know that the three structures she has provided will have as their major focus silliness, silly things happening, which of course are a lot more compelling than focusing on grammatical form. And that is why whenever I get observed I reach for a Matava script. Because the badge wants to see involved kids.
Here’s the bottom line for me. Is it fun? Are the kids having fun and am I having fun? The other bottom line for me is what Krashen said to on the beach in Los Alomitos. He asked me, “What don’t they get about it being unconscious?” Honestly, forays into grammar are maybe fine for the intellectually privileged – that’s my real answer. But I don’t think they’ll learn any faster even with that extra focus on grammar.
I am so glad you are getting that book out there again. I asked him a while ago to get it out there SOMEHOW and he said you were republishing it. That is one of the most important books I have ever read.
Now that sets the table for a skype conversation. Now we have to decide when.