PQA in a Wink

I wrote a book – PQA in a Wink! – that addresses classroom management in TPRS. That was back in 2008, ten years ago. I was reading the conclusion to that book recently and thought I would share it here, since it reflects the same core attitude toward this work that can be found in my early books on TPRS.
When the core approach remains the same, and only the outer details change, then that is good. (I would like to publicly thank Greg for the insights he has shared here on this exact topic over recent years, because he has a kind of laser beam vision of what has happened in the TPRS to CI to NTCI change that some of us have embraced in recent years. His insights and support here have been invaluable.
Here is the passage from the book that I feel captures the core of our work with CI, which won’t change no matter how many teachers stay with TPRS or move to NTCI. That matters a little, but the core ideas expressed below matter a lot:
For thousands of years kids learned languages by listening to them. Meaningful, comprehensible input was all they knew, so the languages they heard were easy for them.
Adults would say things to them that had meaning, look them in the eyes, tell them stories, pause if they didn’t understand, look for their reaction, smile and laugh, sing them songs, and, on a good day, even chant. Adults would ask them questions repeatedly. They learned because it felt right, because what they heard meant something and made sense to them.
Then, for the first time since kids started learning languages, they found out they could be wrong. Unexpectedly, adults started asking kids to learn languages not by listening to them, but by looking at them, how they were constructed, thinking about the pieces of language, etc.
Kids were forced into analyzing language, trying to understand what an adverb is, as if that could be understood by anyone, and what a stem changing verb is. They saw that their success depended on their ability to grasp these ideas.
So they stopped listening to the language in a way that had meaning to them, and they started to engage with the language visually. They began conjugating verbs. This new method had predictable results. Kids learned slowly if at all. Many gave up and put their heads on the desk. It felt wrong to them. But it went on for a really long time, the dark times. It is still going on.
Then Blaine Ray came along, and suggested that we return to a more traditional way of teaching, a way that actually conveyed meaning to the learners. A few embraced his ideas, which he first consciously borrowed and applied in his own classroom from Dr. Stephen Krashen, but many attacked him as being “non-traditional”.
One might ask, “Who, really, are the traditional teachers?” Blaine and his merry band, or those who espouse the new fangled notion that the way to learn a language is to break it up into little pieces and analyzing them?
The ideas expressed in this book are an attempt to bring meaning back into what we do, all of us, when we try to learn and teach another language.
We create new and authentic personalities for each student in our classrooms at the beginning of the year. The teacher and student work together to create in- class personas that work for the student, that grab the student’s interest. If this is not done, the student will create one at the expense of the teacher.
This is true at all levels of instruction. Even at the university level, the student who “fails” is often the one who has been excluded from the process of learning on an emotional level.
By heavily sheltering vocabulary for the first few months of the year, input is kept comprehensible and the focus of attention is on the students. When students easily understand material that is about them, they become motivated to learn more.
When each student has a humorous name, one which really stands out in the group, learning is guaranteed. When each student is known for a particular talent, for something they like, or for a pet, learning is guaranteed. When classroom discussion is about the
students and the things that the create in the classroom, learning is guaranteed.
When our classrooms are personalized, lightheartedness and laughter fill the classrooms. When we meet with parents, instead of tense discussions about how their child doesn’t “measure up” to standards, the parents tell us how important their child feels in our classrooms, and how excited their child is about learning the language we are teaching them.
As more and more new information, true or not true, is gleaned each day about each student, humorous stories begin to emerge. The talents and interests of one student become interwoven with those of another. Imagination, the creation of images in the minds of the students, comes into play*.
Sometimes, as in Anne Matava’s classroom world, an invisible classmate named Biddley makes an appearance in a story.  In response to Anne’s questioning, he explains to the class that he was absent for the past two weeks: he was suspended for wearing inappropriate T-shirts to school with expressions like “I Stole This T-Shirt” or “The Food in Jail Tastes Good”.
Somehow, in this way, the students warm up to their classmates, real or imagined, more than they do to the fictitious students featured in  textbooks. This can hardly be a surprise!
(We must be wary of all “materials”. No “materials” can be expected to solve the problem of what students really need in a classroom. Only we can provide that.)
Increasingly, especially at the lower levels and in Spanish, mixed classes of students with various levels of ability in the target language are being thrown together in class. Some students have no experience, some have a partial background, and native speakers are even thrown into the mix.
How is a set of “the right” materials going to solve that problem, or any of the other strange combinations of (oversized, ELA, mixed) classrooms we are seeing more and more?
No materials can solve such problems! What we all really need and want are classrooms where the emotional needs of all the kids are met first, before we even attempt to address their intellectual needs and what materials to use. We can only do that by focusing on them and their lives and on things that interest them.
With native speakers in the classroom, the first thing I would do is recognize those kids as important sources of learning to those in the room who don’t know the language. I would not tell them to “work with the materials you are given and do this and such a lesson while I work with these beginners over here.” I would include the native speakers in all class discussion and honor them as important. I would teach them how to be a part of the class, how to listen to their classmates in the same way I do, how to be a leader.
If we do our jobs right, some of our students will come back to find us in order to tell us things like, “In your class I felt like you valued me as a person. Thank you so much! I am now a famous fashion designer and I want to fly you and your family to Paris for the opening of my new line of clothing!”
Susie Gross posted on the listserve in April of 2007:
“As I listen to teachers, I hear that something is missing. In our attempt to spell things out and to do TPRS step by step, we have missed the big picture. The big picture is the relationship with kids. The big picture is having a love-fest in class. The big picture is letting go of curriculum and just teaching students.
“A teacher is NOT a moron; a teacher knows that the kiddos need all six conjugated forms of verbs by the end of level one. A teacher knows that they need to say “going to do” and not just “does.” A teacher knows that numbers and colors and agreement are important in this particular language. We don’t need a schedule. We don’t need “going to plus infinitive” this month, forget it, then “wants to plus infinitive” next month. We need to get it all in, but that is easy to do if we speak the language every day and ask lots of questions! Just keep recycling all of the important stuff all of the time all year long. That’s the content and we need to teach it.
”But the BIG PICTURE is the relationships among those in the classroom. That’s what real teaching is all about. If the relationship is healthy, the kids will learn better. If the relationship is shaky, the learning is shaky. Only the teacher has the power to fix classroom relationships.”
There is a parallel here in Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, A Christmas Carol, Scrooge, after his awakening by the three ghosts of Christmas, ran into the street and had the following conversation with a passing boy:
Scrooge: Do you know the butcher shop in the next street?
Boy: I should hope so.
Scrooge: What a remarkable and intelligent boy! Do you know if they have sold the prize turkey that was hanging up in the window? Not the big one! The enormous one! Boy: The one as big as me?
Scrooge: What a wonderful boy! So witty! It’s a pleasure to talk to him! Yes, that’s the one!
Boy: It’s still there!
Scrooge: It is? Go and buy it! Oh, what a lovely boy! I think I’m gonna like children!
The words in italics indicate Scrooge’s changed perception about children. Of course, if we are teachers, we certainly are not scrooges, but do our students know that? Do our families know that? As Scrooge takes a real look at this child, he sees the child’s inherent value and wit. He sees the real person.
Maybe Susie Gross is right. Maybe the greatest thing about this work we are doing lies not in its awesome technique, but in the simple fact of it as a way to bring personalization into our classrooms and into our lives. If we can really see our students as Scrooge does above, maybe we can unlock the greatness of the method once and for all, and in doing so, unlock our own greatness as teachers and as human beings.
*Comprehension based instruction brings a sense of play into the classroom. Chris Mercogliano, writing in “Paths of Learning” (Issue #17, p. 12, 2004), states that there is considerable evidence for “a classical link between education and play.” He points out that the ancient Greek words for education/culture (paideia), play (paidia), and children (paides) all have the same root.