Typically, teachers who go to the trouble of making TPRS work for them experience, as a result of that effort, larger class sizes. There is no need to even mention, in this regard, the precipitous drops experienced in traditional classes – it is a fact.
In a large suburban Denver high school, 89% of students quit their foreign language study at the end of two years. If it’s not required, they don’t want any part of it.
Without the language requirement, few traditional language classes would exist anywhere – the product has too thick a coating of boring on it. But, in classes where TPRS is done properly, the product doesn’t suck at all – students enjoy learning a language, and class sizes go up.
In a large downtown Denver high school, in the period from 1999 to 2004, when Blaine Ray was traveling regularly to this school to train teachers and there was a lot of TPRS activity, the number of AP Spanish students went from around 20 to over 80.
The next time you wonder if you should have ever tried TPRS in the first place, think of TPRS as your job security, especially if you are not a Spanish teacher. We guarantee our jobs when we make learning enjoyable for our students.
At some point, language teachers actually have to deliver a viable product, and TPRS is shown to do that. The clientele in languages is starting to smell the stink and give a much closer look at the language products that schools offer. This can only be very good news for us in storytelling.