Amber, in a previous blog entry here yesterday, said:
“Mainly, I feel that my students (particulary at lower levels) are doing more of ‘memorizing rules’ than they are of acquiring language. Something is coming up short in my activities…. and I think that the issue on my behalf is the amount of instructional
time spent in the TL. I do little of that at lower levels compared to the uppers.”
That, of course, electrified me, because anyone who has embraced TPRS knows that what Amber wrote write there is the precise reason why we stopped doing eclectic teaching and embraced TPRS in our classrooms.
Byron, who sent me this stuff from Amber, then told me:
“…I told her to PQA, and to learn how from you and Susie. Here’s how she responded:”
“Thanks for suggesting the PQA… I’ll look into that. I have a great appreciation for TPRS from what knowledge I have about it…but our department is very rigid on cohesive assessments (every little quiz) and such…. I think it may be a huge headache. And most of my department is not at all excited about TPRS. I am probably not doing enough comprehensible input + 1″ activities…. I feel like I put a lot of effort into my student activities that they complete with each other…but it’s still not creating the responsible outcome I am expecting.”
I have repeat what Amber said – it’s pretty big stuff:
“…but our department is very rigid on cohesive assessments (every little quiz) and such…. I think it [TPRS] may be a huge headache. And most of my department is not at all excited about TPRS. I am probably not doing enough “comprehensible input + 1″ activities…. I feel like I put a lot of effort into my student activities that they complete with each other… but it’s still not creating the responsible outcome I am expecting.”
What I hear Amber saying there is that she wants to do CI with her kids and not the eclectic stuff that she is doing now because she senses that it – the eclectic stuff -lacks power for her. The key point that I must make here to Amber is that all those activities and exercises are heavily output activities – especially at the lower levels. That her department wants to keep her doing those output activities when the kids don’t yet know enough language – output comes later – can be potentially injurious to her career (her sense of happiness in teaching) and to her students’ learning, if we are to believe Krashen that output is the result of input, and not the cause of it.
Amber goes on:
“I am very familiar with the proficiency guidelines..and I teach AP Spanish…and I feel that students need to be better prepared because as one whole group, we do not teach proficiency.”
Sorry, but I have to repeat that – it’s my blog and I get to do what I like:
“I am very familiar with the proficiency guidelines..and I teach AP Spanish…and I feel that students need to be better prepared because as one whole group, we do not teach proficiency.”
Hmmm. O.K. – no comment on that. That pretty much comments on itself. More from this wonderfully honest Amber:
“We teach rules and grammar concepts with writing activities. But we do not teach for proficiency. I probably do more than anyone … but still am weak and want to make a change, especially at lower levels.”
The lower levels thing keeps coming up. That’s what Susan Gross and Thomas Young and I were talking about just three days ago here in Denver:
“My really BIG ERROR (how did I forget to put it down as number one or two???) – Output. I thought that practicing output would make my kids better at output. I did speaking activities (darling adorable cute creative ones) all year long. That was my biggest error. It was the hardest thing to fix!”
Here Susan is saying that in all her years as an exemplary middle school teacher in Colorado Springs, she created hundreds of wonderful games and activities, did them for many years, but then concluded after meeting Blaine, like so many of us, that output exercises don’t lead to output, and that only input leads to output. Oops. And hello Stephen Krashen.
Amber:
“I am teaching Spanish 1 next year for the first time in four years. I really want to do it right. I’m tired of teaching stuff… and then later I see a kid in the hall and ask ‘¿Por que no estas en clase y adonde vas con tanta prisa?’ And too many (not all but enough) have no idea what I’m asking. Yet somehow, they have B’s or C’s in my class. It doesn’t add up. Thanks for the PQA suggestion….I’ll look into it.”
Then Byron wrote this as a response to Amber:
“There are a ton of CI (comprehensible input) activities that you can do to help your students acquire the target language. A whole lot of them are done in TPRS. There are plenty of people for whom the acronym “TPRS” is anathema, I totally get that. Is that you? Is that your reason? Or is there something about the activities themselves that won’t work for you? In any case, there is such a huge overlap between CI activities and TPRS activities, that to reject TPRS stuff out of hand means you might miss out on some things done by all kinds of successful teachers (TPRS or not) who are reaching the goal you describe – ACQUISITION.”
I have to interject here and I would say it directly to Amber:
Amber, I have been doing teaching French for 33 years now. Like Susie, I did plenty of eclectic stuff – all those games and activities. For 24 years. It never felt right, for the same exact reason you stated above, here repeated:
“I’m tired of teaching stuff…and then later I see a kid in the hall and ask ?Por que no estas en clase y adonde vas con tanta prisa? And too many (not all but enough) have no idea what I’m asking. Yet somehow, they have B’s or C’s in my class.”
Yeah, that’s it. Only they got A’s in my class. That’s what happened to many of us in TPRS, I would bet, and I would ask for some amens in the form of comments below on that point. I taught stuff but my kids didn’t really know French. Even my A students didn’t really know anything. That is because I wasn’t using French in classroom for all those years. I was forcing them into hard to grasp mental exercises and activities – only 4%of the kids really could do them. My students didn’t know French because I really wasn’t using French in my classroom. I mistakenly thought that enough output by them at lower levels would do the trick of leading to authentic output. But now I finally get that outputting a language is the result of a far more majestic and complex unconscious set of processes that results from just hearing the language for hundreds and even thousands of hours first, and is something that just can’t be done via conscious analysis (in fact, conscious analysis actually interferes with it), hence the need for massive input first.
Byron continues in his response to Amber:
“There are two books by a hard-core TPRS practitioner that I am still going to recommend to you, because a whole lot of what they contain is good teaching, and they are designed to help you reach your goal. Author: Ben Slavic. Books: “TPRS in a year” and “PQA in a Wink”. Site: www.benslavic.com”
Comment: I know this guy and his books. I have a bunch of them laying around in my basement. He actually is pretty hard core. I’ve read his books. The first one is basically recycled Susan Gross/Blaine Ray, but the other one Ben wrote because he is really into personalization and encouraging, even requiring, kids to become more than just pimples on desks in foreign language classrooms. He suggests putting kids into situations in which they actually feel the reciprocity of human activity while they learn, inviting them to participate in class like real people and not mere passive agressive observors in the process of language acquisition.
Byron:
“PQA is Personal Questions and Answers, and lots of TPRS teachers have bailed on stories, and build most of their activities around talking about their kids. It’s kind of amazing. I’d recommend that first, I think.
“Caveat as to why you might be frustrated: how well do you know the ACTFL proficiency standards? Are your expectations for your kids in line with what we can expect from kids with the limited amount of time they put in? If you make your expectations line up with what is feasible, you might be able to relax some too. ”
Byron Despres-Berry
German Teacher
Appleton East High School
Appleton, Wisconsin