For about the past year and a half, Tina and I have been under a lot of fire – since we started talking about the value of non-targeted input in the TPRS/CI community. We have criticized targeting words from word lists, backwards planning of awkwardly written novels, aligning CI instruction with the teaching of grammar/pacing guides/scope and sequence documents and heavy circling as factors that drag CI classes down, and as out of touch with what the research indicates should be done in a fully functioning language classroom.
During this time we have also been critical of how targeted classes and traditional TPRS in general separate students into those who can and those who cannot. It is this dividing of classes into haves and have-nots that is the subject of this article. We feel that the lack of real community building involving all the students in the classroom has not received the attention it needs in the TPRS/CI community. We connect that problem to the insistence on targeting.
Tina is in Oklahoma at a Native American language conference and addressed the importance of community in language classrooms in a comment here yesterday:
Howard, the manager of the Cherokee language school for teachers (a full-time, two-year program that pays the future teachers a salary as they devote themselves round the clock to acquiring Cherokee so that they can teach the kids) told us a fact last night that really stuck with me. He said that Cherokee kids do not want to be better than the group. So if a teacher asks Johnny a question and he gets it wrong, the others will also answer incorrectly, so as to soothe Johnny’s feelings. Then the tour guide this morning, Miss Tracy, an expert in Cherokee textiles, weaving, and traditional dress, told us that if one person falls, the expectation is that the rest of the community will help them up, and if that is not possible, then they will fall down too, until the person is strong enough to get up on their own. What a change from the competition that we see in schools. Even in CI classrooms, we create little competitions: “What did I just say, Johnny?” Test over the first fifty high-frequency words Friday, Johnny. Retakes on Wednesday, Johnny. Was the dog black or brown, Johnny?
How do targeting and circling and all of the other things listed above (traditional TPRS) – in which five or seven kids run the classroom with the approval of the teacher to form a kind of little “club” within the CI classrooms of today – relate to Tina’s point? It is because the targeting, etc. (traditional TPRS and its desire to to teach the curriculum using comprehensible input against the research) have made it so that in traditional TPRS the material is more important than the students.
We therefore add these things to our list of goals for 2017-2018:
- to fix the division in each class brought by targeting.
- to use non-targeted CI instruction to bring students together in a cohesive group that wants to work as a unit, leaving no one out of the conversation.
- to build community in our classrooms, so that real conversation takes place, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/
It’s a new day. Some of us will shift our attention from the same old same old to finding CI strategies that build community and assure equity in our classrooms next year. We now have some good new (NT) techniques and strategies to do so, and more will be invented.
If targeting did not separate the students and build competition in our classrooms, if it brought the kids together, then we would embrace it. But almost thirty combined years of instruction using TPRS in the targeted way have convinced Tina and I that it can’t work in doing what REALLY MUST BE DONE in our language classrooms – uniting kids in fun and common focus on meaning (while they are completely unaware of the language) and reaping the rewards of that work later without worrying so much about word lists. Down with units!
It is that subtle shift by teachers – a slow twenty year shift since about 2000 – to put the focus on units instead of the meaning of what is being said in a naturally flowing way at the time (e.g. real communication) that is the big problem, and it seems to be growing. Only by building a sense of community amidst fun for ALL the students, to include ALL of the students, can we stop the runaway train of using CI to teach the curriculum instead of using CI to form community and get the kids focused on what really brings acquisition, fun, non-targeted instruction where the kids’ feel happy and that they are a necessary part of the group, all of them.