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If You Still Circle
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8 thoughts on “If You Still Circle”
I remember the same thing when I was doing TPRS. It got boring for me, too. I started doing WBYT this year and my students do just as well on quick quizzes and translations. The good thing is that I’m cutting out the bevy of questions I’d have to remember to ask (and then worry about if I didn’t get enough reps!). It’s hard enough for me to keep my classes engaged when they’re getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night. I realized today that I’d been doing the “Reading from the Back of the Room” reading option wrong. It looked a lot like circling, “Was it a girl or a guy?” “Is he tall or short?” They’ve been bored stiff. No wonder.
I am glad that I learned how to circle because it was good for me to practice asking questions. I think it is a skill teachers could practice in teacher prep programs (ha!) or with their colleagues or whatever. Like a soccer player practicing dribbling around cones or a football player running plays. But once they are in front of real students teachers have to take the skills they practiced in the drill sessions and use them to play the real game. The real game is telling a story, or interviewing a star of the day or whatever interesting conversation you are having. So you use the skill that you drilled outside of class time to make what happens in the classroom interesting to you and the students.
I get a lot of reps in a circling style by only asking questions I actually want to know the answer to – He went to a restaurant? Did he go to a Mexican restaurant or a Japanese restaurant? Who did he go to a restaurant with? How did he go to the restaurant? Oh, he went with his family? Who in his family did he go with? Who else in the class went to a restaurant last night? Once I have a few different kids who have gone to a restaurant I can feign ignorance and ask some repeat questions but I make it seem (or sometimes it is real) like I can’t remember who did what so I need to clarify. It is circling-ish. The reps are not the goal, just a by-product of the conversation.
It’s actually very simple because in normal life, we acquire greater and greater degrees of acquisition not by forced repetition (i.e. repeating of words in a short and unnatural period of time that unfortunately feels forced to the student) but rather over time.
We may not see the word “phenomenological” until we are adults, and only encounter it a few times in our lives, and that is why none of us knows what it means. But with the word “dog” or “ball”, acquisition is a pretty short process, heavily fueled with visual images, like the Invisibles does, with the point being that the child who acquires those words early on doesn’t do so as a result of forced machine gun fire kind of repetitions, but rather naturally.
I love Steven Krashen but in my view he was way off when he gave his blessing to us in Denver (on video – I was in the room – ask Diana Noonan for it) in 2009 saying that TPRS was the “closest thing to his research on languages out there”. This was a big mistake. TPRS in 2009 at that time was all about targeting and circling, and still is. It’s one of the reasons I fled.
TPRS had strayed A LONG WAY from his research, but he gave us his blessing that year and never has rescinded it and now TPRS boasts about their alignment with the research but the shitty results and frustrated teachers who call themselves TPRS teachers were left confused and certainly no blame. Even Teachers Discovery has told me that the books they sell about TPRS are “all over the place”.
What I am calling for is a return to what the research really says. Now, four years after inventing them, it is my opinion that the Star Sequence and the Invisibles allow that return.
I’m presenting on Persona Especial at a local tech conference in about a week. Who is the teacher that originally created Persona Especial and who hardly ever gets the credit for it?
Jody Noble. I’ll post a separate article on it for those interested.
Agree with everything we’re saying about classic circling – that it’s a good discrete skill to know/recognize but that natural & spaced repetitions are as /more important than massed reps through machine gun-fire reps a la circling. Let’s be natural w/our Ss.
I just wanna add that when I did the (16-hour) Mandarin workshop at a pre-conference, we teacher participants were so thirsty for those classic TPRS-style reps (the T was a highly regarded classic TPRS practitioner). It was everyone’s first exposure and the language doesn’t sound or look in any way familiar -(‘cept a handful of cognates which all the Mandarin demo teachers use – chocolate (shok-li), bikini, hambaobao) We knew what the T was doing with the reps and it was comforting to know that the target chunk was going to keep coming around again in novel ways, but that we would hear it again and again…
So maybe there is an argument in support of TPRS-style circling for lesser taught/non-romanized languages? At least it looks /seems more teachable for meaning using classic circling and staying extremely narrow…
For me, circling has a double edged sword. Classic TPRS circling can actually make a T speak faster and have students nervous about not getting certain words. Also, it emphasizes a focus on skill building. Maybe I’m too “left of center” in the CI world but I rather do something more akin to SL than Circling. That said, I use slow light circling as a Bail Out move.
I’m also left of center, but the center has moved slowly to the right since Blaine started all this in the early 1990s. In my view Blaine (when he started) was perfectly in the center bc he perfectly aligned with the research, and that meant no circling, just pure communication. In a March 2016 email he told me that he never targeted.
Circling and later targeting moved in slowly to define a new brand of TPRS, one build around the novels. All that has taken TPRS imperceptibly further and further to focusing on form and “thinking” about the language even when CI is the stated modality. I call that a move to the right.
So when you say you are left of center and me right there with you, Steve (for years now, right?) I think we are really center and perfectly focused on true north.