I don’t think that we can manufacture a really high quality language fabric from targeted input. The strongest and most beautiful colors and patterns and the best community building come from non-targeted input. It is because there is more compelling input in non-targeted input, because it is easier to talk directly to kids about their own lives and interests using non-targeted input.
Speaking of wonderful fabrics, I dove directly into non-targeted input when I was living and teaching in India, in 2015. In those days, which were the early days of the Invisibles, I wrote a number of articles here about my experiments with building invisible characters with my students. I have since removed them for reasons given below.
To be honest, I have felt the greater strength of the non-targeted-generated language fabric since the beginning, in 2001, before TPRS became codified and packaged. TPRS in a Year! and PQA in a Wink! don’t mention targeting, and they date from 2006 and 2007.
Some readers here will perhaps remember the intense time here in winter of 2015-2016. I started writing about the Invisibles and non-targeted instruction and the discussions were rich. But then I removed (did not delete) all those articles. It was because people started bashing their content, not here but on other sites.
On the internet in general, people who were not members of our PLC started judging the work we were doing here. They transferred a lot of anger into it. It shocked me. What was happening in early 2016 was dark and still goes on: people who don’t like the idea of non-targeted input have let it be known far and wide. I removed those articles from here, not because I felt defeated but to remove, so as to protect, my ideas from the firestorm. I needed time to think.
Tina knows the story because she was by early 2016 helping me develop all this stuff. It was like Tina and I against the world. But I need not go into that, because most readers here saw it happening. For most people in CI circles it was targeted business as usual. (It still is.) TPRS leaders (many self-appointed) have sent private emails to us in efforts to stop us.
Why say all this? It is because I was recently going back through some of the posts from that time and I found the series of articles that started the whole thing. Tina was the only one I know of who had been reading them carefully. There were others, Elena Overvold and a few others, but not many.
The original posts here on the topic went back to 2009. In that year I was using the term “targetless”. I had also used the term “untargeted” through the years since 2009 to finally land on the term non-targeted, Krashen’s original term.
And so all those original articles, the ones I removed because of the firestorms they unleashed on Tina and I, which still burn in the hearts of some of our attackers, can be found in the links given below. The reader need only click on them to see how all this got started.
Really close readers in 2016 will remember the “untargeted” posts as part of the “Boats and Trains” original series. The caution is that there is almost too much to read, but, in my view, a thorough understanding of the Invisibles will be the result of a good reading of many of these old articles, some of which were incorporated in A Natural Approach to Stories: