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In Support of Non-Targeted Instruction
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9 thoughts on “In Support of Non-Targeted Instruction”
Ben – it’s Sunday night. Dishes are done. Lesson ‘plans’are done..and I’m enjoying catching up on your musings. I agree about language just floating up naturally. Reading your thoughts as you puttered around your house made me SO glad to be part of the TPRS world and get the privilege of sharing language with my kids.
And then I read the previous post about how we mess up kids with hour self-imposed idols (textbook etc) and I couldn’t agree more. I kept thinking: To whom can I forward this!! It’s too good not to share.
Keep blogging…..you feed my FL soul!
Maria
Newport News, VA
PS: had our kids for 4 days last week and I’m actually enjoying TPRS for the first time in 7 years…the idea about just hanging out with the kids and enjoying THEM is freeing.
Yes it is freeing. But, I have been very sad lately, because the district I left is so lockstep with the old ways. I sent my last set of eighth graders to become part of that 89% dropout rate after two years. That is like a tire company having a 90% failure rate on their tires and getting to stay in business because it is a government run tire company.
I’ve read quite a bit of Krashen but I don’t recall him saying that the brain is selective. Krashen and many others believe there is a natural order to acquisition but it seems more that the order is the way the brain is capable of acquiring, not that it is choosy.
Dave Kees
http://insights-into-tefl.blogspot.com
http://davekees.blogspot.com
I want to add to the above that if it were tires, people would do something about it, but, since it involves kids, that fail rate is left unchallenged, and the fact of the failure is put on the shoulders of the kid instead of the poorly designed curriculum – the kid is lazy or inattentive or whatever. But that is not true. Kids are not lazy. They want to have fun and learn languages. They don’t want to be told that they can’t learn languages. They want to be told that they CAN learn languages.
They want to be told that they CAN learn languages.
Right on spot!
I myself was subjected to the old ways and sometimes I wonder how I became a language teacher myself. Certainly not bc of school. But even my bad grades couldn’t quelch my love of how English sounds. To me it always was like music and I believe that’s what pulled me through.
I love the fact that we don’t leave kids behind. I have a Sudanese girl in my Russian 1 class who nearly flunked my English class for low readers last year because she just quit showing up. She’s so talented that long before the end of the year, I was urging her to start Russian. She dropped Spanish and came on in, just last Thursday.
Today, we were circling the fact that Ted rides really fast on his Mongoose bike in the woods near the school. I asked “how” he rides, and the girl interjected that her uncle’s name is “Kak,” spelled exactly like “how” is in Russian. Kids laughed, and then she volunteered that his last name is Bangit. She said that he has a lot of trouble with that name. I guess so! We circled that name at length, because we couldn’t stop laughing, and then I started asking kids what their names were, and they all came up with very silly names–flibertygibertygibbet was one–and I flashed back to how I used to actually say things like, “Megan, what’s your name?” and how I would have shot down my girl’s information to get back to the curriculum.
Just now I realize she could have been exaggerating big time, but I don’t believe she was. She hasn’t been around long enough to learn the game, and she wasn’t acting like she needed more attention. In any case, all the kids know how to answer what their name is now, something I had to teach one of my level 1 classes last April, because we simply hadn’t gotten to it until then. (They could tell what their brothers’ and sisters’ names were; we hadn’t ever said “My name is” in that class for some reason.)
Later on today, I ran into my student in the hall and told her how talented she is already proving to be in Russian, and she said, “Russian is easy, but it’s the way you teach. In Spanish, we started with page 1 of the workbook. In Russian, you started with US.”
“Russian is easy, but it’s the way you teach. In Spanish, we started with page 1 of the workbook. In Russian, you started with US”
Powerful words. Quotable.
Very beautiful. Very Michele.
with love,
Laurie
Michelle, what an awesome thing for her to have said! How happy you must be!