This is a reposting of an article I wrote here in 2009:
I had an insight after talking to parents for eight hours over two days during parent conferences. In talking to the parents I took away a feeling that they first and foremost want their kids to experience a feeling of success in my classroom more than they want them to learn French.
This accounts for the thousands of teachers around the world who get away with teaching pure grammar in their classrooms, speaking in the target language as little as 10% of the time or less. Here is my point:
As long as the kids have the good grade by memorizing verb conjugations, which does nothing for one’s acquisition of the language, the parents seem o.k. with that. That accounts for what has seemed to me inexplicable – the apathy in terms of results all these long years.
Right? Schools have turned their heads the other way at the lack of actual language gains in their students as long as everybody was “happy”. It has taken the form of a big ass lie for hundreds of thousands of children for over forty years now.
An AP teacher once told me that he had 22 scores of 1 on the AP exam out of a class with 22 kids in it. That’s a lot of worksheets and no one even got a 2.
As a general rule, it is not inaccurate to say that the grade piece supplants real acquisition of foreign languages in American schools. The grade piece rules what is done in the classroom and not any great desire for authentic gains.
But the kids. Are the kids happy and learning? No, they aren’t. They know the deal and they don’t like it. If you are not a teacher, go into a school, if you can get in, and look into those rooms where grammar based book instruction is going on. Look at their faces. Do it. You won’t need to read further in this article because their bored faces make my point for me.
At least, there are now more and more aware admins and few parents who now know the scam and are beginning to react to it with energy, because when their kid after four years of a high school language places into French 101 in college, probably echoing their own foreign language experience in high school or college, they notice.
This silence is really approaching a kind of criminal level. It is a silence that is in its last moments. Alarm clocks are going off all over the place. This silence has wasted untold millions of taxpayers’ money. The hours go by still now, and English is the dominant language in the classroom.
The book companies have made it look like some learning is going on, grades are given out for worksheets and tests passed as a result of short term memorization, and life goes on with little to no acquisition. These are not revolutionary words, they are cold hard facts about the current foreign language scene in the United States.
The fly in the ointment for those tens of thousands of teachers who still do things in the old way, and for the textbook companies, becomes apparent and visible when kids trained with stories go home and excitedly tell their parents about “the story” that day to their parents.
This is a positive thing. People speaking favorably about what they are learning in America’s foreign language classrooms is a new thing, and people are walking around sensing that something big is happening, and they are right.
TPRS and all instruction that is based on comprehensible input is not a flash in the pan, and it will bring about the end of this age of silent ignorance, of acceptance of the preposterous idea that, if a kid is getting a decent grade, then they are learning. This change has signaled now the end of the textbook companies.
It will all happen in the way that termites slowly eat away all of the the insides of a building, and then, all at once, totally unexpectedly, the building falls. That moment is soon, in the next fifteen years. Then there is room in the old space, and the new building based on the research of Dr. Krashen and narrative methods will go up.
I would advise that any young teacher who is just starting out get some training in CI so that when the big shift happens, they are ready. No, not some training, a lot of training. Many schools now openly reject applications of traditional teachers without even giving them an interview.
It’s the admins, not the teachers, who are starting to call bullshit on their traditional language teachers. That doesn’t mean there are not schools wanting the old way, but they are fewer and fewer each year.
Then, when you go into the schools and look in those foreign language classrooms, you won’t see what you see now. You will see life.
Here’s a related quote from Martin Luther King Jr. to end this rather lengthy diatribe and I apologize. I just can’t seem to write short articles. I’m working on it though. Here’s the quote:
…never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way….