My feeling these days, in my seventeenth year of the “TPRS Wars”, is that the preoccupation that we have with the research is just a surface thing. If we were aligning fully with the research, we wouldn’t need to be doing all this arguing. It would work. We would have found a way by now to fully, not partially (that is a huge point) align with the work of Krashen/Mason who have demonstrated through decades of number crunching that language acquisition is an unconscious process and who have shown us that if we don’t make it unconscious via our classroom strategies then it won’t work.
All we seem to do is argue and talk. Talk, talk, talk. Go on some list and argue and insult. There is a faction which insists that massed reps of targets is the only way to do it, and then there are those like me and Tina who eschew targets, pointing rather in the direction of Mason and Story Listening as something really worth looking into, who are recommending a “course correction”, and there are so many others out there actually still clinging to things they used to do fifty years ago. I had contact with a language team at a major U.S. Military Installation lately and Tina and I refused to even go there because they wouldn’t hear us.
What do we need? Who knows? We all have our different opinions. We keep talking while the kids languish. We say it works but it doesn’t, not really. We must find ways of teaching our kids that our the ones that are the most kind. We don’t want our kids to be fearful of not doing the right thing. We do not want them thinking that they can’t do it because of the five to seven faster processors in the room who are ruining everything for them. We don’t want them to have to endure watching their teacher be nervous and stressed in the classroom. They see it. They aren’t stupid. Too many of them are still locked up in their invisible cages in our classrooms.
I vote for more kindness. We already have the research. Why even talk about that part anymore? But we don’t have enough kindness. The research is of the mind and we have enough, right? But we don’t practice enough kindness of heart. We think our work is a mental game and it is not. Then maybe reaching our kids with more kindness would be a good thing right now. I bet it would work! Strategies based on kindness as much as on the research. Combining them. It’s worth a try.