Most of us, me more than others, go into English a lot more than I would ever admit here. I go into English at the drop of a hat. Someone dropped a hat in my classroom just last week and I started speaking English. It’s just that way. And then we say that “some day” we will get the no-English thing down. I doubt it unless we team up to answer this properly right now.
Is TPRS/CI may ultimately be doomed in secondary school classrooms?
Hmmm. Can the CI approach to teaching work in settings where there are large amounts of non-motivated students populating up to 70% or even 80% of our classes?
In every other class such students have, English is a kind of rite of passage to being cool and getting noticed. Many spineless teachers allow a muted sense of rudeness in their kids, one in which English is the business end of their muted trumpet. How we hard core followers of Krashen’s ideas find ANY success in that kind of setting is a mystery to me!
As we continue to uncover all the layers of the method, not all the layers smell like a nice fresh onion. For all our hope and undeniable courage (can anyone say Jeff Brickler?), we might actually one day be thought of as dumb asses who, for twenty failed years now, have been trying to get this square peg of great wonderment into the dark round hole of secondary education as we know it today.
Hmmm. Maybe that is why so many teachers who try to use the method, especially the young ones, are still feeling the crushing of the old way, which thrives on the use of almost unlimited English.
Poeple say that even bad CI is better than no CI. Is it? The fact is that English destroys Krashen’s work. Can this method can actually be done, for a fact, in a setting that is so full of people whose feelings of entitlement in terms of what they are being offered by us borders on the consciously insulting, and I’m not just talking about the kids.
End of five segment rant on Krashen.