A re-post from 2010:
I’ve always been slightly puzzled about why people reject TPRS/CI without deeper investigation. It just seems so silly. Here we have a way of easily reaching kids by staying in target language that is interesting and fun for them, something we never had before, and people toss it off out of hand. Doesn’t that seem off base?
I think I have finally figured out why they do that, and it isn’t silly or weird at all, and I can’t blame them. It is because in TPRS there is so much of the affective element at work that it is really not an intellectual activity at all, which is a truly revolutionary fact in how we approach language learning. Not to mention that the process is unconscious. That’s the big one that the mental teachers miss.
Learning a language is not an intellectual but a sociocultural process, one involving synaptic activity that is impossible in computers, synaptic activity that involves emotions and those other invisible exchanges that characterize language as opposed to mathematics. I am describing things of the heart. People have to show up with some measure of the heart quality to learn a language – they can’t hide in their minds.
The big hiding place for many teachers, many people in all professions and in all types of relationships, is in the mind. If a process can be intellectualized, a person doesn’t have to feel much. When one intellectualizes language instruction, one can just break the material down into its mechanical components and talk about them and bow down at the alter of research. Worksheets are safe. Books are safe. Even turning CI instruction into a method is safe. Which is exactly why they don’t work*.
Think of bedtime for a child. What do they experience? If a parent is absent at that crucial time of day, they experience fear, because, as they are getting ready to let go of their hold on life as they perceived it that day, they must do so alone.
But if a parent is present with open heart and clearly expressed love, no matter how much they are hurting inside, think of what that means to the child! The transition into sleep, the letting go, is not so hard then. There isn’t a robot in the room, but a loving human being, God’s greatest creation, right there. Then sleep becomes sweet….
There is much safety in the room for a child when there is a conscious, loving parent there for them. Prayers, the parent’s smile, their eyes, their gentle voice, a bedtime story (not a grammar lesson) – all serve to guarantee safe passage into the realm of dreams and deeper sleep.
Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century French writer of Essais, went even further with this – he advocated bringing in a group of luths and other musicians to play quietly for the waking child in the morning. It is similar in the military – soldiers are welcomed back to the world with the lovely and lilting song called Reveille. Just kidding.
Now think of a classroom. It is the same way. When we invite our kids into a classroom that is emotionally welcoming (minus judgement), we then don’t have to approach our students with fake smiles and nervous fear in our own hearts, because we know that the instruction we are about to offer them is not going to be some mechanical thing based on some fear about some standardized test.
That robotic, test-driven teaching, which is about to happen again Monday morning in tens if not thousands of thousands of foreign language classrooms around the world, will be characterized by a certain quality of judgement and with the possibility of the kids being wrong.
So no, it is not silly or weird to want to reject TPRS/CI. Anyone who would embrace storytelling, at least as I conceive it, must be willing to let go of the playthings of the intellect, and to learn to bravely re-embrace what they left behind somewhere before middle school – the life of the child, of laughter, of stories, of giving, of sharing, of all of those high qualities that we lost contact with when we grew up into our adult bodies.
My prayer in this regard is always for the younger CI teachers. They have not yet proven themselves in the classroom, yet they must insist on diving into what they feel is right and the best for their kids and the hell with what people think.
*CI instruction is a process, not a method. It can’t be predicted. It must be lived and if it is to truly work it must be enjoyed. Can we do it?