…the “target structures” are just a means of giving the kids language so they can accomplish the ultimate goal of communicating ideas….
Claire said this here last week and this pretty much nails it.
Under Eric’s guidance, we are recently starting to see that the target structures play a far less critical role than most people think. They are not necessary. It’s not a method.
Communication is necessary and so why and how did those structures even get added into the mix of the soup that became current TPRS?
Claire then asked a question:
…Is [targeting structures] common in foreign language education or just a TPRS thing?….
That is so huge. I can suggest one possible typically long winded answer to it (which short answer would be that it is “just a TPRS thing”):
(Disclaimer: I may be off on some of the details here and so would need to get Diana Noonan or Carol Gabb or someone like that to verify what I say here.)
Susan Gross in the 1990s played, in my opinion, an even more important role than Blaine in defining and presenting TPRS to people. She packaged TPRS for those who couldn’t just jump into the Blaine pool. Her influence in this packaging process was at the heart of what TPRS became.
Susan was working with Blaine by actually presenting with him a lot during those early years but he was the pot and she was the fire beneath it. In her own dynamic way in these workshops she gave people ideas like “structures” to hang their teachers’ hats on. The pot (Blaine) and the soup in it (TPRS), came to a fine boil because of the fire (Susan) beneath it. Without the fire, the cold Blaine soup would have never even made it onto the menu of ways to teach a foreign language.
Steps were argued about – how many? We went from 3 to 12 to 17 and back to 3 over a period of just a few years. Target structures appeared, very early. Reading was of course brought in because it was the big haymaker in this work and needed to be. TPRS took shape and became a method, because Susan saw in those early trainings with Blaine that teachers needed to have everything in boxes.
It is possible that without Susan TPRS may not have happened – it may have stalled. Susan was the concrete bridge over to teachers who needed something concrete from what Blaine was presenting. She defended, defined, gave concrete form to what she knew was too vague for them. (One of her favorite things to say at conferences was “Just talk to the kids!” but she knew it was too much for them to handle; being teachers they needed to intellectualize it.
Of course that intellectualization and failure to see what Susan and Blaine were really saying in the early days – that TPRS was not a method but a process and a way of simply being with children in a language class – as necessary as it was to attract people’s notice, also destroyed its subtle beauty and we ended up with the “TPRS Wars” of the past 25 years as aggressive traditional teachers took out, form under their desks, clubs with nails in them and continue to fight for their turf. And so we have all these teachers like John Bracey, John Piazza, jen Schongalla and so may others who are having to put up shields to keep from getting clubbed by people who, being four percenters and having become teachers for that reason only, have no more ability to “just talk to the kids” than they do to fly to the moon.
Now Eric has brought us full circle after these 25 years as this work is starting to take on some kind of closure and return to Blaine and Susie’s original version of this work. We are starting to see again how simple and elemental this work is.
In view of our recent discussion on whether to make PQA optional or not or to drop it all together, Eric has been writing in that direction here for quite some time without just saying it.. The difference between Eric ad Susan being that Susan didn’t have near the research base that Eric has – she just had her own inimitable raw genius based on 30 years in a classroom.
What we do know is that storytelling didn’t include PQA and targeting structures in the beginning.
A side note: we have always had the research on our side. We have always known that the textbook has no basis in research and is based almost 100% on corporate interests, and ignorance. We have always had important links between us and the ivory tower dudes like VP and Krashen and, most importantly to me personally, Vygotsky. Krashen has always seen that Blaine’s conscious effort to base a way of teaching on his (K’s) work is the best expression of his research. (He announced that in Denver publicly in 2009 at a meeting I got to be at – it was like being at the signing of the Declaration of Independence for us.) Why else does Krashen hang out with us every summer at conferences?
So we can suggest that the actual presenting of three structures with a story and other such machinations was a way of placating those who couldn’t get the enormity of the change from one of complexity and living in the mind to one of simplicity and living in the heart.
Again, this is only my opinion based on my own intense years of training with Susan from 2000 to 2008 or so. But in all these years of postings (5,351 posts and 43,112 comments), I personally have not written one word that in some way is not a reflection of something Susan Gross has taught me. That is why I say every chance I can that Susan Gross saved my life.