Redheaded Stepsister - 1

Got this. This is not the only such email I’ve gotten lately. Something is happening:

Ben –

Just wanted to let you know that, after dabbling in comprehensible input instruction for years, my school has decided to do away with it entirely. I can understand the decision – our admins spent a lot of money to get us trained but we could just never seem to get it. All four of us kind of breathed a sigh of relief when we heard the decision. Just thought you’d be interested to hear that.

My response:

I don’t think your team failed and I don’t think that comprehensible input language instruction failed you either. I think it was the way your team was trained. Things are now very different from the way TPRS trainings used to be so long ago. Those offering training in CI right now are all about the products that they sell. They aren’t worried too much about representing the research.

I don’t doubt that these people know the research, but I feel that the growing CI “marketplace” – where all someone has to do is hire a social media company and proclaim that they are an expert – has been too tempting for them as they choose what and how to market their goods and make money instead of directly helping the teachers.

The first to go over to the dark side were Blaine (not really him – he remains a stellar genius – but rather the people around him) and Carol Gaab. They found out that they could literally make millions of dollars by selling those little books. As we have been discussing here lately, the novels got in the way of promoting real CI because they made too many students – many of whom were weak readers in their first language in the first place – read the novels before they had absorbed enough auditory comprehensible input. I won’t go into that bc it’s all been spelled out in recent discussion here and in other places.

The CI car just went into the sand starting with the novels and now it can’t get back on the road. This has been a slow process lasting back to around 2000-2001, but it has been accelerating of late, since those glorious old days when Blaine was doing probably the best and purest form of CI ever done, until those around him started smelling all the dollars. Then the novels happened, all sorts of subtle but disastrous changes happened to what Blaine was originally doing, weak conferences and trainings started happening, trainers’ egos inflated to the point where now there are people who are just presenting off-the-wall material to too many teachers in the form of online activities, most of which do not, again, align with the research.

I stopped doing TPRS/CI in this new and ugly iteration years ago – there was just too much confusion and massive ego issues with the trainings. I was and still am and will always be very happy to have gotten away from those people – some of whom are just plain dark – and just do my own thing again.

I started doing a far more research-based version of comprehensible input language instruction in 2015 and am very happy with it has evolved into now in 2020. I don’t think that what is currently called TPRS or CI is going to go very far in the future. It can’t. It’s got a potato sack around its legs. Schools like the one described above will simply drop it eventually, because the current version makes teachers feel like they can’t teach and that is never a good thing, because they can.

What’s happened in the CI world is that CI has each day, each month, each year of late begun more and more to resemble its red-headed stepsister, traditional teaching, too much. One can hardly tell the difference anymore. The shine is gone from TPRS/CI. It’s sad. The thrill is over. The sisters have become twins. That is what has happened, and now with COVID-19, CI instruction has taken a blow from which it may not be able to recover, because the only reason CI was surviving as a foreign language methodology up to this point was that the kids were a captive audience to the CI instruction happening up to March when schools disbanded for the summer.

It’ll start up again whenever it does, and as long as the kids are physically in the room, 5 will process the class and the other 25 will fake their understanding (see link below). But the decline has started and will most likely continue until, in the future, people will have placed the terms TPRS and CI in the “passing fad” box.

It is going to be sad now to see the profession slowly head down the drain. There will be many jobs lost, victims of the change described herein, and now the “new” and warped version of traditional teaching mixed with CI – the twins – that has become the norm in the CI world – will further confuse things. I do think that there may be a CHANCE to make language teaching work. On verra. On va voir. However you want to say it.