Some History - Ben Slavic

Krashen and others in the 1960’s and 70’s designed the blueprint for the rocket ship (CI). Blaine Ray consciously studied that blueprint and in a move of sheer genius created the first CI rocket ship – TPRS (early 90’s).
His was a non-targeted approach, reflecting the research. But over the next twenty years until now all sorts of redesigns have happened to Blaine’s rocket ship. The two principal changes were the addition of circling and targeting, but there were many others. The more design changes that were made, the heavier the rocket ship became.
All this was to be expected because, of course, how could schools allow language teachers to just come into the building without a curriculum and a good solid data-gathering plan? So, gradually, Blaine’s super simple and sleek original rocket ship underwent some serious design changes. What was really a simple heart based, reciprocal, back-and-forth, participatory way of just interacting verbally in a loose and loving way with the kids changed.
One could say that there was a collision between what Krashen and Vygotsky had discovered about how languages are acquired and the textbook companies and school curricular models. Again no blame. But the unfortunate result was that the Krashen/Vygotsky model was shredded in schools. What is very heart-based and an unconscious process got shoved up into the mind in a slow and almost unnoticed way over the past twenty years.

The fundamental disconnect between the lean and mean and muscular rocket ship that Blaine designed and what schools forced it to become caused a lot of confusion and frustration in a lot of teachers. I tried to keep up with all that by writing some books: TPRS in a Year!, PQA in a Wink!, Stepping Stones to Stories and the Big CI Book, which are still TPRS, although the latter is more of a bridge book.
The Big CI Book goes deep with 27 strategies. Then in 2015 I went to teach at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India, and after all those frustrating years of trying to make targeting and circling work for me, I redesigned my own teaching to more resemble Blaine’s original rocket ship. That was the Invisibles which Tina and I describe in A Natural Approach to Stories (2017).

After many test flights in 2016, with no failed launches, Tina and I were so happy with our new rocket ship – its qualities of minimal stress on us and low planning and low fuel consumption and safety record and how it just flew a lot straighter and higher and faster for us – that we wrote this second book A Natural Approach to the Year, which was the principal focus of our work in 2017.