Krashen and TPRS. Both mean little in Babylon. If the story about Madame Curie is to teach us anything, it is to get us to finally initiate a dialogue based ideas that won’t create a firestorm of ignorance about what those two now almost meaningless terms – both associated with old white men* – actually mean. We should do that by constant open dialogue which is the purpose of this site.
Can we do that to effect? Can we all agree here that our sole purpose here is to fully grasp and fully implement Dr. Krashen’s hypotheses in our daily teaching? Of the two, TPRS and Krashen, the most egregiously misunderstood term is Krashen. And that’s saying something. Why?
Here’s the shitty part: the role of the unconscious mind in learning languages, the din, the Net, the uninterrupted flow** that is so crucial to the instruction process, is simply not done by us in our classrooms, not really, as we continue to overexplain things to our kids and be strung along by the immense daily distractions that we call teaching.
We are like the adults in the Peanuts comic strip, to the extent that the actual pinpointed application of Krashen’s actual ideas (esp. the application of the role of the unconscious mind and I will never stop playing that tune on this site) is simply not done in school settings. It’s de rigueur to mention his name in a book, but when it comes to actually doing it in a classroom, no.
The use/overuse of English in our classrooms destroys Krashen’s vision, destroys it with fire. The comprehension hypothesis is an idea that cannot afford English and the latter is destroying the former.
Anything more than 2% use of English – take your pick on that percentage up to 5% -creates a window that communicates to the class that they also can speak in English. All sorts of points have addressed this issue in this venue over the years, but they skirt the main issue, which is how to deal with:
a. ourselves when we use less the target language less than 98% of the time (that’s what I’m shooting for) in the classroom,
b. kids who deliberately or half way deliberately – knowing the rule – break into English almost on purpose in such a way that the effect is to derail the CI train.
*hey I can say that – I’m older than Blaine and not that much younger than Krashen.
**click on the Flow category for some stuff that I wrote from my heart on what I feel is the gut of Krashen’s work.