Russ (in Portland area) shares:
My position on the Invisibles has always been the same (at least once I understood really what it was and it’s implications for my classroom)…. It’s not drastically different from what other teachers have done in the past [but] is the most aligned with the original ideas of TPRS from Blaine Ray and the results of 40+ years of SLA research. I told Ben this when he was in Portland. I feel like he has stripped away all the extra stuff and is just going back to what Blaine originally had in mind. We are meeting the kids where they are. We are building a curriculum about the kids. The frequency list stuff, the targeting, circling, and all that other stuff was built on top of the original premise. Which comes straight from Fluency through TPR Storytelling:
People love a story, [but] it should be about the kids. The grammar syllabus is not aligned with Krashen’s (and now basically all SLA Researchers’) findings on the nature of Language Acquisition.
The reason I like Kathrin’s analogy* is that we are not reinventing the wheel, just building a better one. It might be a matter of semantics, but for me, I think anyone who scoffs at the Invisibles does not understand either the nature of language acquisition or the origins of TPRS.
I feel like we are in a Post TPRS era. We are squabbling over how people deliver CI. Why do we not just accept that there is no wrong way to do this and call “Same Team”? I have not said much on here because of this reason. I feel like we get attacked enough by administrators, parents, community members, and grammar teachers.
*[ed. note: Kathrin Shechtman in Erlangen, Germany said on FB that “…stepping out of the shadow of a curriculum and going freestyle with these 100% student created stories has been a wonderful change. Do you really have to reinvent the wheel to come up with something new? Can’t you just change the material and composition and have it be new and exciting? I feel like I have gone from a wooden wheel to a rubber one, the basic idea stays the same (Comprehensible Input and Story telling) but the ride is so much smoother. That is MY experience in MY classroom.” ]
