Here is the comment made by Eric that started the discussion about making PQA optional:
…PQA in classic TPRS is targeted. Not sheltered. It may be the one step in TPRS that is most explicitly trying to teach something. I think it makes communication challenging and fake. Contextualizing targets is different from communication. How often do we have a conversation with people and try to repeat one word/phrase in every sentence?
Then, consider the purpose of circling. Is it to communicate or teach something? Do the questions we ask only have one right answer? (hence “meaningful” and not “communicative” as Paulston defines it). Can the questions be answered simply by matching sounds and not really understanding? Don’t others get the eye-glaze from the students when we circle something?…
This comment clearly has within it the seeds of either dropping PQA from TPRS or at least redefining its role in our TPRS classroom. Maybe it’s time now to start talking about the “Two Steps of TPRS”.
This certainly answers a lot of questions (no pun intended) about PQA. Why does it fall flat so much of the time? Why do good teachers get so nervous doing it? Who invented it in the first place? (Bertie Segal invented the questioning process that became Circling but should it have become Step 1 of PQA and tied to target structures in the three step formula that TPRS became?)
We used to think that it was just bad structures that didn’t “lend themselves” to PQA, but could it really be that PQA doesn’t “lend itself to communication”.
This may in turn explain the “mystery” of PQA (which I tried to answer by writing an entire book about!) In reality there may be no mystery at all. It may not be the teacher’s failure (“I can’t do PQA” is almost a chant at the conferences) but rather an inherent failure of PQA itself as a mode of communication for the reasons given by Eric in each of the four questions he brings up in his second paragraph above.
If we drop PQA as a requirement* from the menu, then that first hellish step of trying to get a story going for lots of people would be instantly eliminated and people could just start class by getting up an actor. This could change things for lots of teachers because PQA has cut some pretty good people down at the knees for a long time now.
*Of course, there never was a requirement to do PQA or even circle, but people new to the process don’t know that. Circling is still presented to them as a necessary first step in learning how to do TPRS at the conferences. People have come to mistakenly think that what we do is a “method” and so they think that they have to do PQA and circle structures, so I think we ought to be more clear about both of those things now. In our efforts to define and illustrate TPRS, we have confused people. We don’t need to do PQA and we don’t need to circle.
All this confusion is perhaps due to a flawed belief that our work is a method to follow and not a process to enjoy. In the very effort to make TPRS accessible to new people by describing steps and guidelines, perhaps we have alienated more people than we have helped.