The quote below appeared on the iFLT FB page a few days ago. It reveals a lot. What is the main thing that it reveals? To me, it reveals that Blaine never intended TPRS to go in the targeted direction it did since about 1998. That was done by acolytes and no small amount of individual ego in the people that surrounded Blaine at the increasingly useless summer conferences.
Thus, when Krashen came to Denver and stated in 2008 (we have it on video) that TPRS was “the closest thing that aligns with his work”, we should not have taken that as his blessing. But we did and the next eight years took TPRS further and further afield from Krashen’s hypotheses.
The Natural Order hypothesis has been abused by the school think/speak machinery. His ideas (and Beniko Mason’s) were largely ignored in favor of a massive push by TPRS teachers in favor of class readers (big time profit there but only for a few people).
Krashen’s idea that students cannot learn a language while consciously focused on the form of the language (Comprehensible Input hypothesis) was ignored in favor of focusing on high frequency word/verb lists, thematic unit lists, semantic set word lists, backwards planning for class novels lists, etc. I could go on and on. The reader can read more on this subject of how TPRS doesn’t align with Krashen by clicking on the category on the right side of this page called “Hit List of 25”.
So this from Blaine two days ago on the iFLT page is in my opinion a very significant statement that we all should pay attention to:
