SUPER LONG RANT FOR A SUNDAY:
A teacher in Kazakhstan asked a question this morning that prompted this rant. Sorry about that. I think, however, that it is important to look at the history of what is happening in our field right now. Sorry about any typos – I have to watch the Broncos game now:
Q. I read the BIG CI book, Natural Approach to Stories, OWIs. I found them compelling but I am still struggling with OWIs and Invisibles. Since I am a novice ESL teacher teaching adult teachers, I am not that good with the general planning of lessons regarding term or year-long periods. At the moment, I find myself comfortable relying on the textbook (based on audio-lingual method which I am not a big fan of) and mixing it up with CI strategies. I got the idea that there is a movement towards non-targeted approach of SLA, which you support. But you also say that pre-written structures for stories such as Matava’s is a great companion to CI-based classroom.
A. Matava stories only have structures because when I advised her in 2005 to, because of her genius, write them with structures above them because the TPRS people were presenting it that way then and still are. In other words, the targets at the top of Anne’s scripts are not targets at all in the sense that in the TPRS world targets were and are connected to a curriculum (pulled from lists of words in the textbook, from high frequency lists, from thematic units tied to a book, from lists of words for backwards planning for a novel (big business for the TPRS publishers), or any semantic set of any other kind. This means that Anne never did write scripts for any other reason than they were easy to use for novice teachers as expressed in my book TPRS in a Year! (2007). Without studying the section of that book, it would be hard to envisage how the scripts can be used and I am happy now that Teacher’s Discovery in their new not-yet-published collection of her scripts makes how to use them very clear. (I am also writing a book on how to use Matava Scripts for our teachable.com collection of Bite Size Books found under CI Liftoff.) The thrust of all my work now is to offer to teachers using comprehensible input an option to the “my-way-or-the-highway” message coming from the TPRS community. In 2005 I started working with a teacher on how to do TPRS, and she never got it. She quit and went back to the book. But she was so natural for teaching using CI; she just never fit with all the rules of TPRS. What a loss to those 12 year of students who have since come into her classroom with great hopes only to have them dashed by the experience with the textbook and no blame on the teacher, just on the textbook cartels and, as I will intimate, a weak Dr. Krashen. It is so important to note that Anne’s scripts are not targeted. Of course, when the TPRS world saw the three scripts at the top, they were comfortable; it looked as if it aligned with the TPRS process at the time until in January of 2016 I decided to go with the research (Krashen, 2009 about how targeting puts “constraints on interest”). I came out of the closet with my TPRS colleagues in 2016 because I had never felt comfortable with the structures, nor did I feel comfortable with the people at the national conferences (over 20 years of them) who said that targets was the only way to go. The proof in the pudding over all the years has been that a very small percentage of TPRS teachers even showed an interest in Anne’s scripts, such a treasure for any CI teacher. In 2014 I asked a truly fine person and one of the great leaders of TPRS and the CI movement in general for over two decades, Carol Gaab, what she thought of the Matava scripts and she said, “What are Matava scripts?” As a TPRS book publisher, you’d think she would know. Most people in the CI world still think that the only way to teach a foreign language is with formal, traditional TPRS and targeting. The irony is that Blaine Ray never targeted. I have that in an email from him when I asked him in March of 2016 if he uses targets. He said, “I never thought about it; I guess I don’t.” So that email let me know that in early 2016 I was barking up the right tree. At that exact time I happened to be on what turned out to be a roll with my students at the American Embassy in New Delhi, India with classes of precocious middle schoolers, especially the 6th graders. I had consciously started using no targets in class in January after using the Matava scripts until then. That was the beginning of the Invisibles protocol. All of a sudden, a non-targeted technique that I had been sneaking into my teaching since 2003, One Word Images, was also being done, mostly not in the way I envisaged but that is another story, all over the place. The truth is that the Matava scripts were the only way I could survive in a strong TPRS district, Denver Public Schools, with all its targeting. With 100 WL teachers, I was able to fly under the radar and not get noticed. But I never used targets, I just used the Matava scripts without which we would not be having this conversation because I would have left the teaching profession a long time ago. I was trying to fit in but my own teaching soul – I am only speaking for myself here – wanted to be free in class and just talk with my students as my mentor Susan Gross, taught me, in 2001. So I hope you see now that the Matava scripts and the Invisibles are very compatible. You could use the one to move up to the other. Or you could use the One Word Images strategy to build up to both You can go anywhere with those scripts. You can stay to the script if you are new and unsteady, or you can stray as far from it as the class takes you, as it should be in non-targeted instruction. There is no need to keep repeating targets because when we started the scripts idea in 2005 Anne and I never tied one structure to a list anywhere. Thus, untargeted. If you want, you can use the scripts for reading only. They have nothing to do with a pre-set plan connected to a curriculum in the ways described above. The real problem has been that, when I started doing this non-targeted work, there was a tremendous online backlash from the some of the TPRS people, not Blaine who is too much of a gentleman, but others like Karen Rowan and Terry Waltz who took me and my “partner in crime” Tina Harden to be their enemies, taking us to the back shed and verbally whipping us online over a period of months for our beliefs. Can you tell I still have a bad taste in my mouth about that year (2016) of being bitch-slapped by people who thought of me as someone trying to play a power game with them, as if Tina and I were trying to knock them down off of the phone lines? All we were trying to do was point to something new and, as we sought, align better with the research. That’s all I was trying to do – align with Krashen’s research. The irony in this is that Dr. Krashen himself over the years came out in support of TPRS and targets even though his research strongly Implies that targets bring, as I said above, a “constraint of interest” which, according to him, is a fundamental requirement for CI to really work. There are other notable areas where TPRS does not align with the research. TPRS is to be forever credited for making the great leap over the instructional waters to even find Krashen and implement his work in their instruction and Blaine is to be credited for being the one person to get it all started. But over the years, as happens, TPRS became unwieldy and began serving the interests of a few, those who could do it, but it didn’t serve the interests of everybody. Too many teachers bit the dust with it over too many years and too many, far too many, uncomfortable classes. That needs to stop, and so does this rant. I won’t go into all that here, the reasons TPRS was so hard to do, but I put an article at the end of this rant on it for those who have extra time on their hands to read it. My wish is that teachers really take a good long look at Krashen and Mason’s research to come to a full appreciation of how the work of these great masters has become distorted and mixed in a kind of incestuous way with TPRS. In 2008, in giving TPRS his first blessing of TPRS at a meeting of about 30 teachers in Denver, which I was at, Krashen caused a big stir in announcing his endorsement of TPRS because prior to that he had not endorsed it. So the power players, the ones who benefit financially, continued to put on, year after year, national TPRS conferences that each year increasingly spun Krashen’s research around the targeting idea. But oddly not a word was said about non-targeting and aligning with the research until I aggressively started that dialogue in 2016, because I thought that I couldn’t be alone in my frustrations with TPRS. Tina Hargaden is now the major force in this new movement and has my complete backing because she “gets it”. She had the courage to put every one of her classes online during that time in the spring of 2916, as we intensely corresponded via email about the Invisibles and One Word Images (my way of doing non-targeted CI) and when she started a Facebook site called CI Liftoff that is a closed group to the Old Guard of TPRS, what they saw on video must have resonated with more teachers than she and myself because there are now 2300 teachers on that site, which formally state that its only focus is on getting better at non-targeted CI instruction. So something is happening. Sorry for the rant. I just felt strongly that I should defend Anne’s work as flexible, creative beyond words, and definitely something that a teacher using non-targeted instruction would want to use. In fact, the teacher can go anywhere with them. There is no need to keep repeating the targets at the top of each story with its three “targets” at the top of the script, which are fake and to repeat what I said above, only there because that is how everybody in the TPRS world wanted to see and was thinking at the time and. So, in order to appear that I was a “TPRS Teacher”, I originally recommended to Anne that she publish them with those three fake targets, pulled from each script, but each script was not tied to any of the markers listed above.
For those who have had two cups of coffee or more this morning, this article is from my online PLC:
CI System – 2
By Ben Slavic September 30, 2017 3 Comments (Edit)
I say with certainty after almost two years of writing and talking with Tina and writing a book with her on the topic that in CI we – Tina and I – need something less amorphous than TPRS. The Three Steps of TPRS nailed down a process – the Three Steps – that nailed down how people acquire languages but it didn’t actually give us a failsafe and well-defined system for how to do it.
The Three Steps as designed by Blaine Ray’s process of telling a story first and then reading (listen and read, listen and read, listen and read) is genius. But the process was too vague.
A few years ago now, Tina and I decided to strike out in another direction from what TPRS had become – targeted with lots of rules (see below) but no real system/process in place to help us actually do it. This happened in January of 2016 with our push toward non-targeted instruction.
In the big summer conferences, since 2001 or so, TPRS trainers kept adding on more and more “constraints on interest” (see below again), which is Krashen’s term to describe what language learning does NOT need.
So, with each passing conference, as newer and newer rules piled up (see below yet again), we ended up with a big collection of how to and how not to teach a foreign language, and a lot of people got confused and quit. It was nerve-wracking.
It was all those general rules (see below again for a third time) but they didn’t give us – I am speaking for Tina and I and not everyone here – a specific process, a clear technique that we could count on, just a bunch of rules (see below a fourth time). The One Word Images and the Invisibles gave us that.
The dominant constraining factors, as Tina and I see it, were targeting and circling, but there were many others (see below yet again). Those rules seriously constrained the discussions we tried to get going in our classes. I am talking about Tina and I here, and do not intend to speak for everybody, for whom the TPRS approach works very well.
That is why Tina and I developed a process that we consider to be very close to what Blaine first intended and did/does himself in the TPRS classroom. This insight was first pointed out, to my knowledge, by Russ Albright (Portland). Eric Herman, a true champion of the research, was also instrumental in laying down ideas on my PLC on this topic as we began the non-targeted discussion about six years ago there.
So the key point here is that the Three Steps of TPRS are just too vague and what is taught in the conferences – for me and Tina – is so amorphous and has so many rules, targeting and circling being only a few of them (see below), that teachers at conferences got confused and, like us, disheartened and nervous.
Since Tina and I never felt comfortable with the information we got at conferences, here we are, with the backing of some big name teachers like Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg, Mike Peto and Justin Slocum Bailey and many others, pushing non-targeted, rule-free CI instruction in a much tighter process-oriented system that works much better for us.
Hence the CI Liftoff site here, a closed group that is not intended to open up discussion of how we learn languages, but only to discuss how (not why) non-targeted instruction works.
*targets; massed reps (of targets); heavy, ponderous circling vs. Tina’s idea, which Krashen liked, of “light circling”; reading up where kids are not able to read with what Krashen says is a necessary factor when reading a new language – effortlessness where the text is like reading a movie; PQA – it didn’t take long for the kids to see that I was asking them personalized questions merely in order to try to teach them a structure; establishing meaning (this is not necessary if we are teaching slowly enough and the context is interesting); having kids supply cute answers; gesturing as a group; lengthy undisciplined stories; class reading of novels (because that is a school thing and leads to rule by the few); using celebrities. I don’t know or care who they are, and many of my kid don’t either; feeling as if I had to do a story even when I wasn’t having the best day; trying to finish a story that was too long; not having a safe set of golden rails for my CI train to go down; dominance of the classroom by the few bc of the targeting of lists (high frequency lists, thematic unit word lists, semantic set lists, lists of words taken from chapters in novels for backwards planning, TPR lists); being cute and perky all the time; cuing kids to do the “Ohhhh!” move (they are not trained seals); making the kids create a six panel drawing of a story when they are only in level 1, etc.