Looking back, I often wonder why the method, almost 25 years old now, hasn’t taken off in our schools, since it arguably still remains out of at least 99% of our classrooms in any effective way.
Here are the five biggest reasons for this failure, ranked in order, in my opinion:
1. Lack of persistence on the part of the teacher to learn it, due to the vast amount of internal change/retooling needed for success.
2. Failure to understand how truly foreign the language is to the students, and assuming that they can understand more language in class than they can actually understand. This point was brought home to me again this summer in the Denver and Chicago war rooms, as I tried to learn other languages, for example, Gaelic, even though the instructor was a tremendous naturally gifted teacher going perfectly slowly enough (Jason Bond). I STILL found repeated expressions difficult to internalize.
3. Failure on the part of the teacher to keep students from blurting. In my opinion this is largely due to a lack of personal power on the part of the teacher to confront children in the proper loving way in class, after having established clear consequences tied to their grades. (And yes, I state yet again that we are perfectly justified in tying how students behave in our classrooms to their grades as our subject matter warrants that as explained in numerous articles and comments here over the past two years, if it isn’t enough simply that Robert Harrell says so.)
4. Failure to speak slowly enough so that our students can understand us.
5. Perception and resultant enmity by other teachers that TPRS doesn’t work, because of our own inabilities to make it work by announcing to others that we “do TPRS” when we don’t do anything resembling TPRS, leading to a general misunderstanding in the profession of what the method actually is.
I would like to read what other reasons other group members might add to this list.