This is a comment turned blog entry from a week ago about the history, as I see it, of comprehension based instruction over the past fifty years:
We must respect the vision set out in 1983 when the push towards fluency instruction in ACTFL – on the level of theory only in those years, unfortunately – was picking up speed and direction, a direction started in 1963 at the Northeast Conference principally by Simon Belasco (this is just my own poking around in the past); see
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/05/13/1963-a-blow-to-his-confidence-30/
It was like a seed planted in 1963 that grew into a shoot in the ’80s with Krashen and now has shown some flowers (each one of us) in Blaine’s work.
What happened, in my view, was that the ’80s and ’90s belonged to the book and the corporate interests that drove their sales. Each year, the ACTFL yearly meetings were pretty much corporate events as they are now. The difference was that there were no Bryce Hedstroms or Leslie Davisons presenting at those conferences ten years ago, or, if there were, nobody could hear them amidst all the opening and shutting of books.
Over those years the corporations who had their hands all over ACTFL (and still do) probably never bothered to read the standards and the 90% use statement – why should they? Nobody else was, least alone the teachers who were firmly teaching from the book during those years. Much easier to say about Blaine when he showed up on the scene, “He’s a crackpot!” and just maintain the status quo.
So, over the course of the ’90s, the original 1963 statement of Belasco as researched by Krashen and others got ignored. Research by a gifted research professor in California was one thing, it was only research for twenty years. No Blaine.
Then Blaine’s ideas gained a lot of speed when he figured out a way to make everything – ACTFL standards and Krashen – line up so that they worked in the classroom. That was in the mid to late ’90s, and is continuing on today.
I think that Blaine did that research purposefully, by the way, but I may be wrong on that point. He certainly invented the formula for Coke in our profession, however, and should never be pushed aside by new competing forces in terms of where the mojo to make Krashen work came from – it came from him and Joe Neilson and Susan Gross and Jason Fritze, primarily, Again, this is just my opinion, one based on what I’ve heard over the years in going to conferences and all and meeting those people.
It doesn’t matter. The cat was out of the bag when Krashen did his first research in the ’80s. The die was cast and just waiting for people like us to infiltrate ACTFL as we are now, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/03/08/krashen-let-the-cat-out-of-the-bag/
Bryce sees our future with ACTFL in a positive way and is not critical of those who would prefer (ACTFL practice not theory) books and old business as usual in the classroom. He just says that we need to get more people presenting at ACTFL, and not under the name TPRS which is frighteningly polarizing because it threatens jobs and crushes egos and is therefore naturally pushed away by the old guard, bless their hearts.
It will be a gradual change and TPRS will not be the banner under which the (imperceptible) change will actually go down over the next 50 years. The banner will probably be the banner of proficiency via comprehensible input, or something like that. People will warm to the change much faster if we all stop trying to push the term TPRS down people’s throats. That has been, through no fault of Blaine, but rather through just plain confusion, the reason for a lot of the dissension of recent years.
As the old bookies die off and leave the profession, Krashen’s work will take on new meaning and power. Then things will speed up. We are in the early and very muddy stages of this. We get extra credit for trying to teach using Krashen’s ideas now in this time. I don’t care about the extra credit. My interest is in not wasting the time of people in false instruction, and also in avoiding making millions of kids feel stupid, if at all possible. That has been going on long enough in language education already.
So, Chris, this is all my own opinion, of course. I could be way off and probably am on some of the details above. That, also, doesn’t matter. There is line from an old Dave Mason song that “there is no bad guy, there is no good guy, there’s only me and you and we just disagree”.
I was going to say that the teachers who clinged and still cling to the book can’t be expected to give up their livelihood and everything they believe about teaching, even if it is for the four percenters only, and ACTFL can’t be blamed for doing what it’s constituents who comprise it do, not to mention the role of the corporate mindset in all of this. And the CI people can’t be faulted for being passionate about what we believe. I do draw the line on personal attacks and hence our privacy stance here. It will slowly shift. Nobody’s to blame.