Carla asked me about Circling recently. I don’t know what the TPRS/CI community is up to these days, but I gathered from what Carla said that they still circle. God bless them.
I find that Circling does not work. It seems to work, but it doesn’t. It does, however, bore kids once they figure out the pattern.
What is the real problem with Circling? In my view, it is that the constant repetition in very short periods of time does not allow for fresh thoughts to fit into the context of what is being said. Instead of being constant, the repetition should at best be sporadic (spread out over time). This allows time for interest to build within rich contextual input. When Circling is used, the integrity of the communication, its capacity to bring interest to the kids, fails, because there is no rich contextual input, because the focus is on teaching words, not language.
The idea of providing “interesting comprehensible input” – which are the three most important words in the research – gives way, in Circling, to a kind of “need” on the teacher to teach only certain words: the words from the chapter in the textbook, the words from a list of thematic units, the words from semantic set vocabulary, the words from high frequency verb lists, the words from prepared lists of words taken from chapters in one of those class-dividing novels, etc.
What is the Big Lie then? It is that, in our field among all others and uniquely so, we have come to believe that if we circle, we will “teach the words” from the curricular identifiers listed above.
The problem with that position is that at least half the class doesn’t care, resulting in classroom management problems.
If Circling doesn’t work, then what does work?
In my experience, we need to take an honest and close look at how people really acquire language – through interesting comprehensible input. The research does not say that human beings acquire language through constant repetition by the instructor of certain targeted words in a classroom to prepare for a test.
So why did TPRS go in that direction?
It is my view that Circling, and many other “skills” and “techniques” that haven’t changed in more than 20 years (!) can be sold to new and therefore naturally (with no blame) teachers who were never properly weaned from the textbook method and taught to swim in the true and fine and azur waters of the research. What does that mean?
For the past 17 years, instead of focusing on helping teachers new to comprehensible input how to simply communicate with their students via interesting comprehensible input, the TPRS/CI experts of today instead have chosen to make a simple thing complicated, in the way that teachers tend to do in schools, like blowfish with testing karma in their bluster, with the predictable result in all subjects that the teacher and a few teacher-like blowfish students will dominate the class and the rest of the people in the room – who are perfectly capable of and perfectly wired to acquire a language – fade into the paint on the walls.
I was in the front row here in Denver in 2004 when Blaine Ray “unveiled” Circling, and a big room of about 100 people almost fell out of their chairs with how wonderful it was. Here was another skill to make what is most natural (human communication) contrived! Another teacher success!
It seems that all we have ever really done in language education is to teach in contrived ways. Do this. Don’t do that. Do what So and So does because they are an expert (if you don’t believe them, just ask them). Don’t do what So and So does. Buy our products.
The problem is that, though such “leadership” is needed in other school subjects, it doesn’t work that way in languages. Teachers think that they have to “teach language” because they are teachers and since there is something to teach (the language), there must be teachers and so the teachers go in where they are not needed (God designed language learning pretty well and that is enough – to God be that glory) and make up products to sell and so for 20 years now we have deferred to self-proclaimed experts to tell us how to teach our languages while forgetting that language does not need experts.
Noam Chomsky has said:
“Grammar [ed. note: Chomsky uses the term grammar and language interchangeably bc he is a TRUE EXPERT] is acquired by virtually everyone, effortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner, merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure, and care.” Put in the simplest of terms, you just hang out in the language and you acquire the language.
Chomsky’s observation reflects this statement found in the ACTFL web pages:
The Interpersonal Mode of Communication is defined by ACTFL as “active oral or written communication in which the participants negotiate meaning to make sure that their message is understood.”
Has it occurred to anyone reading yet that all we really need to do in our work is just take a deep breath, let go of all the pretense, and communicate with our students?