Of course, the knock on TPRS/ELA has been that there is lack of a common language in an ELA classroom which prevents us from establishing meaning and so confuses the students in multi-language classrooms, since translation is not an option.
Establishing meaning before a story may be a very small part of what we do but it carries huge importance. If a child doesn’t know what a word means before a story is started she can’t understand the story.
So the commonly accepted view is that TPRS is best used in single language classrooms. This may be true, but do we throw the baby out with the bath water? Do we throw out the huge potential of storytelling to influence the more output driven ELA world because of that one glitch? Can a bridge be built between TPRS and ELA that brings greater outcomes than we have seen to date?
I think we can narrow the gap. We should at least try. Things we need to address are:
1) Can stories be successfully used in multiple language classrooms with no common first language?
2) Can ELA teachers be cncouraged to use less forced output in their work, and thus better align their classroom instruction with Krashen’s research, so that all the millions of raised affective filters happening in ELA classrooms right now across the world can be lowered?
Larry asked me to write an article about TPRS for his site, but anyone who has read what Jeannette, Judy, Laurie and Chris have written on his site know that we don’t need any more articles explaining TPRS because those are so well written. Instead, we need to supply Larry with some kind of statement about ELA and TPRS.
(à suivre)