Nathan Beck in St. Louis has a request of the group:
Dear Ben,
Hello! My name is Nathan Beck and I’ve been following your TPRS PLC for about a year, reading as much as I can (there’s so much!). I’ve been using TPRS with my Spanish I and having great success and I truly believe in the power of CI and am very interested in continuing to advocate for CI and TPRS in the classroom. I’ll be heading off to start a PhD program this fall and I was thinking that I’d like to focus a lot of my research on different issues within TPRS-classrooms as well as in comparisons between TPRS and ‘traditional’ classrooms. I feel that formal, published research could help to convince more people about the merits of CI and currently there is very scant research on the topic! I’ve read through many issues of the IFLTJ and have found some research there, but I think more would be better and from different people in academia, etc etc. I wanted to pose the question to you and the PLC: If you were to do formal research on TPRS, what types of questions would you try to answer? What types of issues would you want to gather data on? I’d be really curious and grateful for some input! Thanks so much for everything that you do and I look forward to hearing back from you.
Sincerely,
Nathan
My initial reaction on this, and just my opinion, is that there are so few of us really doing CI (I certainly can’t say that I am doing it as pure CI – who can in the buildings we work in?*) , it’s just confusing. Among those claiming to use the method, as per the recent discussion about CI vs. ci – Grant Boulanger’s term and a crucial point – I honestly and bluntly would say that most who claim to do CI are really doing ci, so how can any results be taken from that?
If you haven’t read those posts, they should be read before going on – the idea of CI vs. ci is going to become a bigger and bigger factor in all discussion about Krashen as the years go by. People will continue to claim to be doing CI when they are really doing ci and the resultant professional conversation over the next decades will be completely useless babble. So here are those key links:
- https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/02/21/what-is-ci/
- https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/02/22/what-is-ci-3/
I think that is why Blaine and others who have tried to gather data on TPRS/CI over the years (since the early 1990’s when the first stories started happening), expecting strong data, got little much of anything that had strong numbers and credible research. Yes, there have been studies (Barb Watson’s is the best), but the factors mentioned above always skew the data, and badly, in my opinion. Von’s study was not good research, certainly. How can we get any real results when people do the method in ways that are not controlled?
So, Nathan, I would say that if you can’t gather a set of norms for the teaching that provides you with the actual data you use for this project, it would be easy to poke holes in. I think that this group may provide the best set of teachers in the world to participate in such a study. You would have to get a team of teachers here, setting up a common site perhaps for them to communicate with you. The control of what they do in their classrooms would be crucial, in my opinion. The teachers would have to be willing to participate and record just what they are doing, even video it, so that you could actually show naysayers the instruction that provided your final data.
Not only that, and this is the really gnarly part, who would be willing to participate in the control group? What traditional teacher out there would be willing to video, if you decide that is important, their snoozing classes and their four percenters up in the front rows? Their classes done in English? All that hooey? The truth about how they have been doctoring/skewing their results across the board, using assessments that favor their pedagogy only, and doing so now for decades, would come out. And they don’t want that.
Just my blunt thoughts. Don’t want to be a downer, but I do want to make sure that you don’t create your assessment process without a bunch of opinions from real CI people first. And group, that last sentence is your cue to put your coffee down and hit the keys for Nathan.
*this is another issue. Krashen designed his research around some terms he got from Simon Belasco twenty years earlier, and that research was about language acquisition, not language acquisition in schools, and there is a difference, a huge one. For more on that Simon Belasco comment, read here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/05/13/1963-a-blow-to-his-confidence-30/