I say with certainty after almost two years of writing and talking with Tina and writing a book with her on the topic that in CI we – Tina and I – need something less amorphous than TPRS. The Three Steps of TPRS nailed down a process – the Three Steps – that nailed down how people acquire languages but it didn’t actually give us a failsafe and well-defined system for how to do it.
The Three Steps as designed by Blaine Ray’s process of telling a story first and then reading (listen and read, listen and read, listen and read) is genius. But the process was too vague.
A few years ago now, Tina and I decided to strike out in another direction from what TPRS had become – targeted with lots of rules (see below) but no real system/process in place to help us actually do it. This happened in January of 2016 with our push toward non-targeted instruction.
In the big summer conferences, since 2001 or so, TPRS trainers kept adding on more and more “constraints on interest” (see below again), which is Krashen’s term to describe what language learning does NOT need.
So, with each passing conference, as newer and newer rules piled up (see below yet again), we ended up with a big collection of how to and how not to teach a foreign language, and a lot of people got confused and quit. It was nerve-wracking.
It was all those general rules (see below again for a third time) but they didn’t give us – I am speaking for Tina and I and not everyone here – a specific process, a clear technique that we could count on, just a bunch of rules (see below a fourth time). The One Word Images and the Invisibles gave us that.
The dominant constraining factors, as Tina and I see it, were targeting and circling, but there were many others (see below yet again). Those rules seriously constrained the discussions we tried to get going in our classes. I am talking about Tina and I here, and do not intend to speak for everybody, for whom the TPRS approach works very well.
That is why Tina and I developed a process that we consider to be very close to what Blaine first intended and did/does himself in the TPRS classroom. This insight was first pointed out, to my knowledge, by Russ Albright (Portland). Eric Herman, a true champion of the research, was also instrumental in laying down ideas on my PLC on this topic as we began the non-targeted discussion about six years ago there.
So the key point here is that the Three Steps of TPRS are just too vague and what is taught in the conferences – for me and Tina – is so amorphous and has so many rules, targeting and circling being only a few of them (see below), that teachers at conferences got confused and, like us, disheartened and nervous.
Since Tina and I never felt comfortable with the information we got at conferences, here we are, with the backing of some big name teachers like Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg, Mike Peto and Justin Slocum Bailey and many others, pushing non-targeted, rule-free CI instruction in a much tighter process-oriented system that works much better for us.
Hence the CI Liftoff site here, a closed group that is not intended to open up discussion of how we learn languages, but only to discuss how (not why) non-targeted instruction works.
*targets; massed reps (of targets); heavy, ponderous circling vs. Tina’s idea, which Krashen liked, of “light circling”; reading up where kids are not able to read with what Krashen says is a necessary factor when reading a new language – effortlessness where the text is like reading a movie; PQA – it didn’t take long for the kids to see that I was asking them personalized questions merely in order to try to teach them a structure; establishing meaning (this is not necessary if we are teaching slowly enough and the context is interesting); having kids supply cute answers; gesturing as a group; lengthy undisciplined stories; class reading of novels (because that is a school thing and leads to rule by the few); using celebrities. I don’t know or care who they are, and many of my kid don’t either; feeling as if I had to do a story even when I wasn’t having the best day; trying to finish a story that was too long; not having a safe set of golden rails for my CI train to go down; dominance of the classroom by the few bc of the targeting of lists (high frequency lists, thematic unit word lists, semantic set lists, lists of words taken from chapters in novels for backwards planning, TPR lists); being cute and perky all the time; cuing kids to do the “Ohhhh!” move (they are not trained seals); making the kids create a six panel drawing of a story when they are only in level 1, etc.