This post originally appeared here five years ago:
How could I have believed that Dr. Krashen’s work is anything but the best way on which to base my teaching of language? I spent 24 years teaching AP French Language and Literature using the old way and it totally sucked, but in my defense I had never heard of Krashen’s work before I met Susan Gross in 2001.
Prior to that year, my kids never made any real gains towards actual fluency (that is the keyword in the discussion about methods) because I wasn’t using the language in the classroom. I was merely talking about the language during those long and completely frustrating years. Horrible years.
Any success I was having was because those (mainly white gifted females) at that level would succeed on any test because they were really smart. They would study French for a few years in middle school and then take four full years in high school and some of them would even get a 3 for those six or seven years of direct instruction to tests. Very impressive! Many got scores of 1 or 2 on the exam. Hopeless instruction resulted in hopeless scores.
Those children of privilege, however, wouldn’t know an Achievement Gap stinkbomb if it hit them in the eye. Well, that was because the other kids in the room were not gifted at languages like they were, right?
Smart white girl: Achievement Gap? What Achievement Gap? I’m just smarter than them!
Teacher: Yes you are, my precious, and that 1 you got on the AP exam, that was just a mistake!
Anyway, I was teaching during those years in South Carolina to the test and not for fluency and I had never heard of Susan Gross and I didn’t even know about the Achievement Gap all around me and so helped perpetrate it.
It is so different now. After being blessed with many gifted mentors of TPRS, in particular Susan Gross in Colorado Springs and Diana Noonan here in Denver, I can officially say that I am now teaching for fluency and not to the test. I love saying that.
And the irony is that I have a gaggle of sophomores – about twenty – who will pass the AP French exam next year as level 3 juniors with 3’s and 4’s with no prior background. [ed. note: this actually happened. This post was written in 2009-10 and I have since communicated with Sarah Rasay, a blog member who took those 10th grade kids over from me at East High School when I left to go to Lincoln, using CI methods. Sarah recently reported to me that those kids did indeed pass the AP exam with little effort and that some of them are now continuing on with their French in college. I was so happy to hear that from Sarah!]
Now I am not just teaching the four percent of students who soldier on to the AP exam because it is expected of them and looks good on their college applications and they are good at worksheets. (The real AP game is: I get the “AP” term on my transcript, and it helps get me into college, and who cares about the scores because they are reported in the summer, well after I am accepted.)
Here’s the dirty little secret about those years in South Carolina – even though some of those kids passed the AP exam on my watch, they didn’t know French. Not really. Nope.
Teaching to the test using lots of English never brings anything but skewed results. That has always been true, it is true now, and it will always be true.
The rhetoric of the TPRS wars, I would assume, must be remarkably similar to the rhetoric that must have accompanied Galileo’s championing of Copernicanism and the notion that the Earth is not the center of the universe. The vast majority of language instructors still subscribe to what is essentially a notion of teaching (the use of English to teach another language) that is no longer supported by the research.
Such a notion hasn’t been supportable since Dr. Krashen hit the scene. What Krashen did, if only indirectly, was to bring us closer into real touch with Vygotsky. [ed. note: our own PLC member Mark Knowles, Director of the Anderson Language and Technology Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, is working, as we speak, on some research involving Krashen and Vygotsky and us! More on that here as it unfolds over the next year. And yes, Mark will be at iFLT…]
What Krashen said only seems preposterous to the same kinds of brains that sat inside the heads of the philosophers and clerics of the time who believed Copernicus’ thinking to be preposterous.
What Krashen says is true. Somebody had to say it, and he did, and now nothing can be the same. We need to use the target language 98% of the time or more in our classrooms or we will fail as generations of language teachers before us have failed.
Krashen let the cat out of the bag. Now it is up to us to tame the cat. He has said as much to us. He said, “I just did the research; it’s up to you all to get it into the classrooms.”
