[ed. note: I met Doug Stone in San Antonio last year. He is in the L.A. area and has worked with Blaine, Robert, and others to retool his teaching as per input based methods. He recently sent me a few emails that are quite powerful statements. They reflect a ton of hard work over the past year]
First email:
So the year is ending on a similar note to the beginning–conflicts with several parents who want me to give verb conjugations and grammar worksheets so their kids can get into Spanish 2. I understand their point, but when they do this I feel like a doctor who is practicing modern medicine being asked by patients to throw in a little bloodletting into the treatment because bloodletting is how their doctor healed them. This situation is helping me to more fully understand the dynamics of the vicious circle language teachers face here. It has as protagonists teachers, administrators, parents, book companies, authors and often unwillingly, many of us TPRSers. Correct me if I’m off, but it seems to go like this: Teachers graduate, but knowledge of how to align their teaching with SLA research is not sufficient (this isn’t a problem just here). How to manage a classroom also is not addressed sufficiently and so many fall into “the book is my methodology guide and classroom management scheme” mode. This creates its own set of problems as commercial books fall short methodologically as well as in terms of classroom management (engagement as well, but that’s another story). Commercial books are created to earn money, and to do that, they have to appeal to a wide audience and cover often vague and easily misinterpreted standards. The book companies know that among those to whom they must appeal are teachers and administrators who will use their own language learning experience for criterion—which more than likely included lots of grammar and long vocabulary lists to memorize. To be sure to appeal to these people the authors put in grammar focuses, silly thematic units, and practice drills disguised as communicative activities, even though they know better. Teachers who don’t know a better way (they haven’t found TPRS or another viable alternative—many of us have been there), or are insecure about their authority, or aren’t language teachers, or combinations of the above, fall back on how they learned: taking the “grammar points” from the book and unruly amounts of vocabulary and turn them into out-of-context grammar work and vocabulary memorization—culling students based on unrealistic expectations of accuracy at too early a stage, streamlining their populations to kids who will pass that AP—throwing by the wayside kids who may lack in mathematical language skill, but who all have potential real language skills. And those of us who do understand the process of acquisition are caught up into supporting this because we need to meet status quo—either we feel a responsibility towards our students to help them survive a traditional classroom, and/or our “performance” is being measured by a standard of success which is based on the traditional grammar recognition, vocabulary memorization teaching model. So in effect, those of us who know better wind up supporting a system which is grossly outdated.