Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
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Michael Nagelkerke
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10 thoughts on “Michael Nagelkerke”
“but kids don’t learn anything using TPRS.”
I’ve heard this so many times from people in other districts and my students are now starting to compare themselves to the students in the other Spanish I classes in my building and they’re starting to think they’re not learning anything either because they can’t tell time and they can’t have fake, scripted conversations with each other.
This misconception needs to be at the forefront of TPRS if we want to win over hearts and minds. Too many people think that students aren’t learning anything with this method.
I repeat:
Two different paradigms at odds here:
1) input leads to output
or
2) output leads to output
The misconception about “learning” goes much deeper than we think. I don’t believe that “output” teachers believe “acquisition” to be very important. Output is important to them, and memorized output is quite manageable and discretely measurable. Acquisition is not either of those. We can “manage” the input, but we can’t manage the output. It is messy and impossible to corral in the traditional way.
I was responding to Chris’ post.
This is an important distinction, Jody. Thanks for all the clarifications you make on this blog. I would add that output-oriented teachers probably believe that memorizing phrases in the TL will lead to acquisition.
John, I’m afraid that there is an entire league of people out there who believe that those memorized phrases ARE acquisition.
with love,
Laurie
Bless their hearts.
“Output is important to them, and memorized output is quite manageable and discretely measurable. Acquisition is not either of those. We can “manage” the input, but we can’t manage the output. It is messy and impossible to corral in the traditional way.”
Nicely said. You put in words the one of the key problems in education today, not just FL class. Teaching students in a way that is conducive to think critically, creatively, and originally is difficult to assess. Traditional meathods are much easier to assess and put into data spreadsheets.
Sometimes I feel like I am an ambassador of TPRS, out to show the rest of the world how great it is. I recently presented to our school board and showed 8 minutes worth of video footage. Granted, I couldn’t have orchestrated a better interaction with my students, but people were impressed. But I think we have to rely on word of mouth, on our students to share their success stories (i.e. Laurie’s former student who helped an injured man), on parents to pass on anecdotes they hear from their children. I teach in a very small community, where everyone knows everything, so that’s not hard. But I just try to do my job every day, teach my kids to the best of my ability and hope that the word gets out.
My two colleagues and I at the private K-12 Christian school where I teach part-time (I have grades 2-6 and share HS Spanish 4) have switched to TPRS this year. We are blessed to have Spanish for at least 3, 30-minute periods per week at every single grade level, and we are using comprehensible input to the best of our growing abilities at every grade level. It’s been rewarding and challenging, and after decades of being traditional language teachers, we’ve had a lot to think and talk about.
One topic that comes up frequently for us is comparing whether our students are learning to do all that they would have been learning to do with a traditional textbook. When we realize things like — hey, they’ve never learned to tell someone their names, or, they don’t even know how to tell time!!, we’ve confronted the issue head on. Just because something is taught in a sequence in a regular grammar-based book doesn’t mean that it is something that *shouldn’t* be taught via CI/TPRS. We *do* want our kids to be able to introduce themselves to people, and to be able to tell time in Spanish! So we’ve decided that we have to work that kind of stuff into our stories. When character X goes to location A and meets character Z, we use Blaine’s tricks of feeding the kids their lines, and they introduce themselves. And maybe one of our characters will need to know what time it is, so we can go looking for a clock or something … We also deal with the reality that a significant number of our kids may leave our school after 8th grade to move on to the public high school (for different sports or club opportunities, usually), and we know that they will be using a traditional textbook when they leave us. We want them to outshine their future classmates, so we’re trying to plan ahead and prepare them as best we can, using the method that we now know to be so much more effective.
I think this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that there *is* content that we need to remember to teach. I make sure my own children learn their numbers and can count and tell time in English; of course my student “kids” need to be able to do the same in Spanish, and I am accountable for teaching them to do so, no matter what methodology I am using. We teachers are quarterbacking the stories/input, after all, so we’d better have an idea what we should be including, don’t you think?
I’m primarily responding to Chris’s comment above. I believe that no methodology is foolproof — you have to be conscientious, responsible, and able to teach, or whatever method you use is going to fail. So if we hear people say that kids don’t learn anything in TPRS, we need to evaluate that comment. Are they referring to kids who are able to communicate according to ACTFL standards but haven’t learned linguistic terminology or how to conjugate verbs in a chart? Or are they noticing that we are forgetting to include something that we should have made part of our stories so that our kids could acquire it?
There’s always so much to think about in this new CI world …
Right ON! We do need to know how to introduce ourselves in our target language and making it part of our conversations/stories is a real thing. It fits what I think of as comprehensible input. I often use a song to teach the phrase because we use–“what is it called?” so often that as soon as they click onto this phrase the world can open for them. It is also the first pop-up grammer lesson as me-you-and he/she/it come into play. That 5 minutes the first 5 lessons of the year are gold to me.
What I keep getting from all the fabulous teachers on this blog is that we have to keep open to what works for us in our class with our students, our admin, our parents. We can generalize, but the specifics are day to day and person to person. That is hard when we’ve been wired to use the uni-sex one size fits all approach of a factory education versus thinking in terms of a classroom family.
When I wrote my “learning goals” for class, the last one said–
We will speak when ready. I think that allowed for everyone to speak in their own time.
Today we are performing at our all school weekly assembly. Most of my children are doing two or three things not just my little story. So, I’ve had to amend individuals saying a line and rather a choral reading in order that everyone can be on stage and the pressure moves to all of us rather than any particular 4% of us. We all learn at different rates.
I got the idea for doing Brown Bear from reading this blog. Fits perfectly for k-8. We all know the story in English. Today we will hear it in Mvskoke, Russian, and Spanish. It gave all 3 classes a direction and we each went at it in our own way.