Story Listening works and is easy for both teacher and students, because it aligns with Krashen in these areas: 1) acquisition/learning; 2) natural order; 3) affective filter; 4) compelling comprehensible input; 5) monitor (not output but for input).
Tina and Beniko were presenting in Washington state yesterday. Tina reports:
…a Spanish teacher who attended the workshop wrote to me today already and said that she had a great success with her students with a SL lesson, and the students were happy, and the observer (administrator) was happy too….
…yesterday in a workshop two teachers who only saw two SL demonstrations in English and Japanese demonstrated a great SL lesson in French and another in Spanish….
In these cases, just one exposure to SL can train teachers and many of them seem to have instant success. Maybe teachers don’t need to attend years and years of conferences to learn how to teach using CI. It is because real CI is so natural. Perhaps TPRS is actually based on Skill-building disguised with the term CI. Is that why so many people have been so disillusioned and have been made to wonder about the wide gap between Krashen and TPRS, one that is finally coming to light? That is good, because the more light on the wide gap, the fewer will be the amount of teachers will fall into it. Not-So-Fun Fact: we estimate that 75% of people who attend a national conference for the first time do not return for a second year of training.