On the topic of sheltered vs. targeted we need to define the terms. Since we all have come to this work in different ways, we all may have different ideas of what they mean.
Here’s what I think they mean, and in no way do I consider them some kind of “correct” definition:
Sheltered language instruction is when we are very careful in our speech to not use words that our students don’t already know. We increase the vocabulary of our students over time in a very slow and deliberate way, in a “sheltered” way.
We don’t shelter grammar. This is Susan Gross’ famous line, “Shelter vocabulary, not grammar.” What it means to me is that if we use words they already know in proper speech, language acquisition proceeds along like a car that is being driven slowly, not challenged at high speeds, everything is comfortable, and the students are not even aware of the twists and turns and steep uphills on the way to acquisition since there are none, and they just focus effortlessly on the message.
We in our field of languages have made what is naturally designed to be effortless and easy into something tortuous for most people, and countless people go through their lives thinking that they are bad at languages when they are not bad at languages at all; they are just being taught in a way that makes them feel that way.
Targeted instruction is not to be considered entirely separate from sheltered instruction. An example is when we take two or three new words or groups of words and repeat them over and over inside a story. We shelter the new vocabulary (a good script really helps us do that), ideally limiting the words we use to only words the students already know up to that point and then introducing two or three new targets. That is pretty sheltered instruction! Then while the targeted structures are repeated and repeated during the story, the students don’t notice them because they are focused on the message, and so they acquire according to the way Dr. Krashen has described.
But this process has come under Eric’s microscope lately. He is saying – if I understand him correctly – that we as a general group may not be staying in bounds enough to make the sheltered vocabulary rule work properly. I hear Eric suggesting that we may possibly be getting too interested in forming our instruction around more and more structures, kind of resembling what traditional teachers do with their thematic lists.
We seem now to be saying or at least exploring the idea here lately that if we pay less and less attention to targets, and instead allow the simple richness of human communication to occur in a sheltered vocabulary environment where the quality of interaction and not any targeted structures drive the language gains in an atmosphere of rich negotiated meaning, that the gains might be better and our CI instruction might move up a level or two.
We all know that there is a fundamental rift between teaching from lists and using CI, so we now need to embrace this little confusion about the use targeted structures in our CI instruction that is occurring in this latest thread on this topic.
Then there is also the fact that around 2009 Dr. Krashen was thinking and writing a lot about targeted vs. non-targeted structures. There is a category here on that for those who may want to read more about that:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/non-targeted-comprehensible-input/
I may be wrong, but I think that the idea of non-targeted structures is kind of what we’re moving toward in this discussion. I think we are moving towards a kind of higher and more pure form of communication with our students. I think we realized now that we need more highly sheltered discussion in order to do that. We want to perhaps move aways from targeting specific structures to eventually be able to read a novel, and just let unfettered language live more in our classroom. I don’t know if that is true or not but that is the impression I have. I’m trying to get my mind around a vague topic. I do know that the French definition of the Art of Conversation as being divorced from all planned outcomes reflects more what I want in my own classroom, in part because I am lazy and I don’t see what all the planning is about.
I do remember a time around 2009/2010 when Dr. Krahsen seemed to come into a kind of mild opposition to our continued focus on the use of structures in stories. That was always a point of contention between TPRS and Dr. Krashen. Many of us dismissed his idea of purely non-targeted instruction because we felt we needed our structures to get through a TPRS storytelling class since we didn’t have all day to talk to our kids. Now that seems to be in question to maybe a small extent.
Related: http://susangrosstprs.com/articles/IMPORTNATURALLANGINL1.pdf