Brian Barabe has been doing this work for almost twenty years and really gets it. It is so nice to hear from him once again in this report from Chandler, Arizona:
Hey Ben –
I have given various TPRS related presentations at the fall conference of AZLA, the Arizona Language Association since 2005. Two years ago Pat Barrett and I detailed the three basic parts of a TPRS lesson (establishing meaning, telling/asking the story, reading the story or a similar story). Pat then told a simple story about a boy and a ferocious dragon in Russian, and the attendees were gleeful that they understood the whole thing. A year before that I demonstrated Movietalk, and the year before that, embedded reading.
But somehow, TPRS has not caught fire in Arizona. So this year I decided not to pull any punches and named my presentation “Getting to 90% with CI and TPRS.” I prepared fifteen packets with basics–the three parts, a story outline with three places to go to, and a sample story. It turned out I needed 33 packets. The room was full, one person sat in the doorway, and four that I had personally invited could not get in. And there were three other sessions at the same time plus the featured principal presentation on assessment in a large room.
The room was quiet when I started with this quote from Krashen: Current language acquisition theory claims that we acquire language in only one way, when we understand messages, that is, when we obtain “comprehensible input.” Thus we acquire when we understand what people tell us or what we read, when we are absorbed in the message. More precisely, we acquire when we “understand messages containing aspects of language that we are developmentally ready to acquire but have not yet acquired.” Stephen Krashen, Foreign Language Education the Easy Way.
What I presented was so white-bread and elementary to a TPRSer, and the attendees ate it up. There were several good questions (how do you keep your energy up?), lots of laughter, and total acceptance of the concepts and methodology. Everyone in the room agreed that they would urge AZLA to hold a TPRS workshop. Finally, the room was further electrified by the enthusiasm of about six people who already use TPRS.