I find it very helpful to ask myself before each class, “What do you want to teach?” or “What are you teaching?” It seems like an obvious question, but do we know?
To me thinking in this way really helps. I target these structures, for example:
- assis(e) en face de – seated across from
- ressemble à – looks like, resembles
- il ne faut pas – you must not, one must not
That’s what I want to teach. I don’t want to teach a thematically organized list of words, a computer program with the latest bells and whistles, a bunch of units in a book, or any other combination of language no matter how it is packaged. I want to teach a few structures over 50 minutes, so that I don’t waste my time and their time.
How can my students, in level 2, with about 200 or so hours of French out of the 15,000 hours needed for mastery, be expected to understand a story or read a book in the target language in that amount of time?
My students need a lot more hours than 200 hours to be able to understand non-targeted language in auditory and written ways. So in the first 200 hours I have to keep it simple by targeting just a few structures for those first few years.
Then, when the students are up to the “massive” amount of 400 or 500 hours of French, which they call “advanced” in an odd use of the term, at levels 3 and 4, the curve of understanding the spoken and written language begins its slow upward bend, and with each passing year the gains begin to go up exponentially so that after 15,000 hours they irrefutably have acquired the language, it isn’t “rusty”, it’s there, and it is real.
Had they spent those first four years conjugating verbs, they would have no results to show for their efforts, and they would most likely hate the language and the culture, most having quit as soon as they got their two year requirement satisfied.
What do I want to teach? I want to teach those structures.
The difference that most people may not grasp, the mistake they make with TPRS and with comprehensible input instruction in general, is that in their ignorance they think that going over the structures, using them in class less than a hundred times or so, is enough for acquisition. It’s not. It’s not enough for acquisition or anything resembling acquisition.
Students have to hear the structures many more than a few hundred times, and they have to hear it in an interesting contextual setting. They have to hear the structures a lot, and the
Students have to hear the structures used much more than a hundred times, and in context that is meaningful and interesting to them, before one can say that there has been acquisition.