I found this old post from 2007. I had shared in that year a lot of emails with a colleague in Martinique who had experienced great success in PQA in a short amount of time with very little direct help. Very new to teaching using comprehension based methods, he nevertheless ended up that day with his students in a place called Whacky Town. He told me that it was a homerun moment and he was delighted beyond measure with the magic spun in his classroom that day. But he also told me that his observing tutor in that class suggested at the end of class that there was “not much output”. Here is my response:
Erwan! Formidable! I am so happy that you and your students visited Whacky Town! And the details were so perfect – the class collective mind made that little pink fella Lacoste! And the toilet! Yes, they are predictable on certain things… like my kid who plays the accordion while fishing in toilets. This is indeed great news! But you tell me that your tutor was looking for more output. Why more output? Are your students not like one year olds?
Don’t you think that the kids deserve to hear the language in a meaningful context for a while before having to produce something? Isn’t forced output going to raise that affective filter to a point where what you had today is suddenly gone because kids are feeling self-conscious and fearful about possibly being wrong, as they do in so many of their other classes, more concerned, in fact, about “getting it wrong” than actually speaking the language? Doesn’t language emerge naturally, as per Krashen’s supremely important research, for those who will hear it? Don’t you think that your kids want that feeling in the room that little Lacoste brought in today and the toilet and all that, or do you want them to get on the defensive again, and experience the most destructive element in teaching, the sense on the part of the kids that they could be wrong? Sorry about the ranting, but I get that way when I see teachers trying to force language out of kids. I know you won’t. The observing teacher needs to closely observe a group of two or three or four year old kids and how forced output would pepper spray them and stomp all over the emergent miracle of speech as it organizes itself – perfectly all by itself* – into output in their precious little minds.
*Isn’t it marvelous that the most important things in creation, like:
– the growing of a seed into a flower
– the transformation of an embryo into a baby
– the arrangement of neurological activity into the sacred thing that we call speech
all happen out of sight, in places where man’s hand/mind cannot reach, where they can occur naturally, where they can’t be sabotaged?