The word out on CI now and for the past ten years is to get the students reading as much as possible as early as possible. But that doesn’t make sense. They have to hear and understand the spoken language before making that next step to reading, don’t they? It’s just common sense.
But profits in our society are always more important than making sense, it seems. It’s about greed in our society. At a national conference in Kansas City, Blaine told me he had sold 500,000 of Pobre Ana and that was in 2005, only a few years since he and Contee published it.
The now-retired Carol was – back in the day when we still thought CI might work – a CI purist, but like many other TPRS/CI “experts” , it’s probably fair to say that Carol went into chapter book creation and sales for the very transparent reason that book sales in education are far more lucrative than anything else. In an odd sort of way, the entire TPRS movement has become about book sales.
Carol Gaab’s entire chapter book production company, which she created about ten years ago in response to Blaine’s success, was just sold to Scholastic Books for a tidy sum. TPRS leaders have been rolling in large amounts of dollars by selling stuff that makes them money, but isn’t necessarily aligned with best practices and the research.
In the earlier levels (1 and 2), the research doesn’t advocate more and more reading and less of a focus on the auditory input piece – it recommends the opposite.
So TPRS became, early on, very much a kind of book selling operation. Could some of us even be therefore working in favor of the textbook companies because we don’t really get the research?
Entire language faculties do not object to textbooks. They keep teaching out of textbooks even when the research strongly shows that that is a bad idea. The taxpayers buy the books – up to $15,000 for a set for a department.
Teachers just accept the corporate textbook control of our profession, it seems. What an indictment of them professionally, to forsake the research about how people actually learn languages in return for a lot of hassles with bored kids, not to mention horrible results in terms of gains in proficiency!
So yeah – the Few are still in charge of our profession, serving their own interests instead of aligning their book and other expensive products with the actual research. The average textbook cost is between $80 and $150. Here are some related facts:
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-textbooks
Y’all good with this?