This was a comment but I wanted to make it into a post:
Craig said:
…the structure of the system is incompatible with the nature of language learning….
Now we need to really reconsider what we’re talking about. I have been repeatedly called to task for criticizing certain things like novels and testing and target structures, but I still stand by my point that those are things that teachers slowly over the years began to think, began to imprint on the method, that those things were needed to make comprehensible input work in schools, and that Blaine allowed for whatever reason, in order to be able to make stories even work in our classrooms. I am not convinced that the way we are doing TPRS in schools is the best way to do it. We didn’t need to make it into a method. It’s not a method. I do know that without Anne Matava’s scripts to use as the wind under my scared wings for the first 15 and 1/2 of the 16 years I did TPRS in middle and high schools, I would not be teaching now.
Those things like novels and testing and targets are all part of a kind of “school based TPRS” system that has really become the property of the same group of people now for decades, who have every reason to want to create the illusion that TPRS is just one big happy family as long as they get to be in charge. Anyway, TPRS has failed for far too many people and Krashen knew that it was only approaching marriage status with his hypotheses. It’s been a long engagement where the groom, TPRS, has become each year less and less interested in the bride, Krashen’s hypotheses. (Krashen seemed to tolerate that failure but Beniko never did tolerate it*.)
I convinced myself I could do it as a method and with skills and all that. I even wrote books about it, but until lately I have to admit that inside I thought I always sucked at it and then we started to meet here and that made it so much better because I could see that the same repeated failures were being expressed by many other honest people who weren’t afraid to say what was really going on in their classrooms. But when some really good leaders throughout the nation tried over and over again to get it to work in schools, but just couldn’t, not as per my vision anyway, I started to see that something was rotten in Denmark. Man it just seemed like TPRS just had too much fake going on in it. Craig this could be a pretty big discussion.
Plus, since each year 75% of the attendees at the national conferences are new, that tells me that many of the people who attended the year before have failed in their attempts. Why? Because (1) there is too much natural opposition from others in school buildings, (2) the way it is taught at conferences now, at least 3 years and certainly not 1 would be necessary to get the necessary training to learn how to do all the method stuff like make the novels, the circling, the assessement, the pagames, the targets work in the mildly effective way they do now. It’s all gotten too complicated.
And that has allowed the same old group of trainers to do the same old tired trainings in some cases for over 20 years now to come in and do the same old demos and training but if they had been working, then where are the results? Why is it all happening at such a slow rate? Is this epic change really going to take 200 years to complete? We really need to look at what Craig says, here repeated, and we need to think about it:
…the structure of the system is incompatible with the nature of language learning….
Then the next question is what are we going to do about that?
*I am weary of people telling me it’s working. Too many kids are still faking the learning, and too many teachers are still working in that level of low-grade fear that they don’t know what they are really doing.