Today I mustered up my courage to tell Annick Chen, our gifted superstar TPRS teacher of Mandarin at Abraham Lincoln High School, that I am done with the composition books. It suddenly hit me how useless they are, really. They are one of those vestiges of the past. Annick didn’t bat an eyelash. She said she completely agreed with me. It was strong to get that validation. So to the list of:
– textbooks
– homework, except as per Nathan – the best models by far on homework come from him and Harrell – those teachers who have figured out how to marry the words interesting/meaningful/compelling to the word homework.
I am now adding to the list of useless stuff in language teaching that I discard with joy:
– notebooks/composition books (those who are emotionally attached to the idea that they need to take notes in order to learn can do so but when they finally fully get the class they, too, will fold them and toss them).
Besides the notebooks, the Thematic Unit grades are about done too. We can’t learn languages from word lists.
So look what the current and best research is doing here. If the composition books don’t help (find me the research that they help), then why require them? And if the word lists – that is all the Thematic Units are, impressive though they may be, don’t work, then why connect the kids’ grades to them? Both the notebooks and word lists have virtually nothing to do with acquiring a language.
The position I am taking here is my opinion based on my own experience and is primarily about the first two years. If we do the input first, then we get the output in nice ways starting in March or April of year 2 for many kids, earlier in some, later in others. We can write things down and memorize lists of words later.
Let’s start things out the right way by learning some language first. Then we can worry about the cute stuff later, the output, the writing, etc. In a way, notebooks and memorizing words are a form of forced output. Screw that.
We don’t learn languages by writing things down and by memorizing lists of words. We don’t learn languages by writing things down and by memorizing lists of words. I don’t know how else to say it. Maybe this:
We learn languages by delivering massive amounts of comprehensible input to our students in the forms of reading and writing for a long time until the output in the forms of speaking and writing come out naturally later.
So I’m calling myself out on this. If my belief after an entire career of trying to get to the deep truths of teaching languages is that input is the only effective way, then I have to cut the cord with all trappings of too early output. Feels good. A little honesty here. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road littered with books, pencils, lists of words, and notebooks.
I own this and take action. (motto of my new school – Abraham Lincoln High School. How cool is that?)