In our email communication about Circling, Carla wrote this:
“This week I have been watching a Spanish class by one of the experts… I was struck by how monotonous circling seemed even in the hands of an expert. It looked like what you described above. It would be great if I could wrap my mind around the alternative.”
I responded:
It seems to be a contradiction to say that an expert’s instruction is monotonous.
Youll see the alternative (in our approaching Zoom training). I just don’t need to circle, and you don’t either. I don’t want Circling to form the foundation for my CI instruction, which is based on something far more effective than circling. I went through my change in ’08 and Krashen did it in the same year. The Krashen-TPRS honeymoon began to unravel for the first time about then. Why?
It is because TPRS (the term CI wasn’t invented until 2011 at the earliest and it took time to gain traction) became so targeted that it lost its power and became FAKE as a result of its contrived marriage with the textbook and other curriculum nightmares. I have described NTCI in my “75 Reasons I Prefer NTCI” article on the PLC. Just search that term.
Here are just 2 of those 75 reasons:
1. When I was using the TPRS skill of Circling, I would very often get an automatic, almost predictable eye roll from my students. But I would keep up my fake smile going like I was enjoying it, but inside I wanted to scream. This does not happen in NTCI because circling is not used.
2. One thing about Circling is that it demands a certain natural ability to communicate on the part of the teacher. If the teacher has that quality, the communication will take place even though Circling as an instructional skill waters down the level of interest even, apparently, in the hands of experts. But if the teacher lacks this natural communicative ability – and there is no blame nor any reason to expect them to have it if they were trained in the old way – Circling can be a real problem.
