This in my view is a significant post here today because it is an example of many such emails that Tina and I have been getting lately in support of our work promoting non-targeted CI instruction. We are seeing proof now in classrooms that the thematic unit “align with the curriculum” mindspeak that dominates our field right now can and is being dealt with successfully by teachers willing to take the plunge into non-targeted input.
Megan Smallwood of the MO CI Liftoff group, started by a St. Louis district language coordinator, Jeff Tamaroff, was completely brand new to CI three weeks ago. Tina and I went to St. Louis, did a three day training, and this is the result. This kind of puts a pin in the hot air balloon of those who like people to think that teaching using comprehensible input is hard, and that people need to spend large amounts of money and time in the summer, over years, learning how to do it, and even then, as in my case and Tina’s case, never really feeling comfortable with it.
Perhaps the long and very often failed learning curve for TPRS was due not so much to the CI aspect of it but rather to all the rules that popped up after Blaine initially started TPRS a long ago, and I have an email from Blaine in my possession from a year ago responding “I don’t think so” to my inquiry as to whether HE, the dude who invented TPRS, targets words and structures, as per https://benslavic.com/blog/hit-list-of-8/. Bold letters below are mine:
Ben and Tina –
I am emailing to tell you the good news. It really was amazing how we came up with such a cute story and all I had to do was keep it in bounds. I am very excited to start this all fresh next year. I went over the words we covered in this story. Of course they all fit into our “Level 1” curriculum just at different times to fit a “theme” so this is definitely going to work. I plan to do this in all my classes next year 6th, 7th, and 8th. The 8th grade class I have next year is our “low level” class which is usually very hard to teach the traditional way, so I am excited to see the difference with this new method.