David said: I am proposing the following categories for your blog. These are areas in which I have a huge interest. I will explain also my rationale for proposing these categories. [ed. note – text edited with permission of author for length]
1) ESL
This is the number one concern of mine….A lot more ESL teachers have heard of Krashen than foreign language teachers. First, I define ESL as teaching a language to students with whom you do not share another language….TPRS depends for the most part on making input comprehensible through translation. In a certain sense good ESL teachers are already teaching through comprehensible input methods because there is really no other way to teach a language if you do not share a common language with your students….The term “whole language” is not one that I have heard TPRS folks use. Krashen has written and said a lot about it. Aren’t we all in the whole language camp? Isn’t the main idea of “whole language” that language learning/acquisition is mostly implicit learning? There are some good accounts written about or by refugees who have come to the U.S. that have contrasted their very enriching whole language experiences with decontextualized grammar intensive nonsensical instruction. “My Trouble is My English” and “An Island of English: Teaching ESL in Chinatown” by Dangling Fu are practically whole language manifestos.
My response: I like the word “unconscious” instead of “implicit”. Krashen’s use of the term “whole language” is also a process that I personally think of as a term to describe the unconscious process of acquisition, in which we focus on the meaning and not the words . We were talking on the beach at the 2010 Los Alamitos iFLT Conference and he said, rather pointedly, referencing some blogs written here that year about how language acquisition is an unconscious process, “What don’t they understand about the term “unconscious”? When discussing ESL, therefore my position is simple – there is no difference at all between TPRS when used in second language acquisition and when used in ESL classes. This definition fits neatly with the one you gave above: “I define ESL as teaching a language to students with whom you do not share another language.” That’s our situation in TPRS/CI classes – we never bring into any class any words or expressions that the kids haven’t already learned. Rather, in TPRS stories we only very rarely bring in new vocabulary. It follows that ESL can work in exactly the same way as stories work in TPRS/CI classes. It’s just that many of us forget that simple premise – the overiding and almost totally ignored premise that in TPRS we largely keep translational references to L1 out of the instructional process. As long as we don’t introduce anything new except the three structures, which in a TPRS-based ESL class can be explained via pictures or sign language or even via direct translation like we do in TPRS if there are few varied language groups in the room and someone is bilingual to do that establishing meaning piece at the start of a lesson. If we can just explain the three structures, then everything we say and discuss here about TPRS must apply to ESL instruction. It’s just a question of choosing and presenting the structures in a logical way from the start, taking the first 100 words – never more than 200 hand picked words – for beginners and judiciously choosing high frequency structures after that. Having said all that, I thus cannot agree with your statement: “TPRS depends for the most part on making input comprehensible through translation.” I don’t do that. I used but I don’t now. I will admit that I used to use Point and Pause quite a bit, but now I just use it if students absolutely insist on knowing how to say something. This, by the way, is a very good example of what I want to do with this blog – make points like this which are hard to convey even at conferences. I welcome any argument on this. I could easily be wrong but this is the way I see it. To conclude, we carefully choose new structures that have never been presented and present them in a story that only uses all of the other words already known by the class. So, except in the establishing of meaning, we don’t use translation in TPRS. Therefore, there is no reason not to use TPRS in teaching ESL.