Eric went through and found some really valuable quotes from four TPRS masters. Here is the first one:
Susie Gross – Jan 26, 2014
No there is NO requirement for a story to have three locations.
I started doing TPRS workshops in the 1990’s. In those days, beginning teachers said that they could not speak the language consistently for 40 + minutes and yet keep it comprehensible. They said that they could not think of questions to ask. They said that they could not come up with stories.
To address these concerns and in order to give teachers the tools to enable them to see that they in fact COULD do those things, we came up with little formulae/tools that would give the teachers the power to stay in the language. Those tools were PQA (use the target phrase in a question that included something of interest to the student), circling questions and repeating the answers (kept the questions comprehensible and made the structures so familiar that the structures sounded right), and three locations in a story. The point of three locations was that even if you can’t think of a story, the main character can go somewhere and you use the three structures in a failed attempt to do something. Then the character goes somewhere else and you can use the three structures while the character again fails in whatever the quest is, and then goes to a third location and either fails again or succeeds, but the teacher has now told a story that is as engaging as the teacher can make it… and had a HUGE number of repetitions of the target structures.
So are three locations necessary for language acquisition to occur? Of course not.
But back in the 90’s it was one heck of an uphill battle to give a workshop that got teachers to
1. Believe in CI and believe that it would work if they abandoned the standard textbook.
2. Believe that they did indeed have the language skills and teaching skills to do it!
You see, back in those days teachers thought that if they said a word three or four times and had the kids repeat it, then the vocabulary had been properly introduced! It was fair game for ever after that!
We had to BREAK that habit and get the teachers to believe that TONS of repetition was a preferable way to get the language to sound right. So we went for 80 – 180 reps, just to vividly BREAK the old way and make teachers see that abundant reps would work. They had so MANY things to change that TPRS was scary. We tried to come up with little tools and formulae to help give them confidence. (I know I just repeated myself there, but that’s the TPRS in me.)