Susan Gross commented to me the other day about two kinds of teachers who don’t do TPRS – those who base their teaching on worksheets and those who work hard to be eclectic in the best sense of providing their students lots of varied opportunities to learn the language. I feel that what she said about the latter group needs to be repeated here.
So what about those eclectic teachers, those who work hard to provide high energy, fun, activities, which, because they are high energy and fun, therefore must be leading to acquisition?
Susie’s point is that those activites don’t lead to authentic acquisition. They are cute but they don’t lead to acquisition. They are output. Input is the key to acquisition, not output. The traditional exercises and activities – not necessarily worksheets but all that “stuff” – only SEEM valuable, but the listening and and reading that we might otherwise be doing in our classrooms can’t be done (the input can’t be done) because all of those paired activities and cooperative learning only lead, precisely, to learning, and not acquisition.
Susie talking now on this topic when she visited East yesterday:
“My really BIG ERROR (how did I forget to put it down as number one or two???) Output. I thought that practicing output would make my kids better at output. I did speaking activities (darling adorable cute creative ones) all year long. That was my biggest error. It was the hardest thing to fix!”
So output exercises don’t lead to output. Input leads to output. The reason that I want to push this point here is that the next four blogs, very important blogs, from Amber Sullivan need to be read in terms of what Susie said above. You’ll get the connection once you read Amber’s blogs.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
8 thoughts on “Output Activities In The Eclectic Classroom”
Read the following urgent stuff!
Today’s Yahoo news has an article about some brain research that suggests the brain can’t do more than two things at a time, can multitask beyond two. Maybe that explains why a language can’t be acquired by output activities, why there first has to be copious comrehensible input .
Here’s my related hypothesis:
Language aquistion is tasking in one part of the medial prefrontal cortex to process not yet acquired linguistic form and simulataneously tasking in another part to attach the meaning. To output labnguage at this stage is for the brain to perform impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult, 3-part multitasking. One the linguistic form and meaning have been acquired, coupled together as one task, then output no longer overly stresses the medial profrontal cortex.
This needs to be extensively discussed and researched.
The above is repeated with typing corrections. I want it to be clearly u7nderstood
Read the following urgent stuff!
Today’s Yahoo news has an article about some brain research that suggests the brain can’t do more than two things at a time, can’t multitask beyond two. Maybe that explains why a language can’t be acquired by output activities, why there first has to be copious comprehensible input .
Here’s my related hypothesis:
Language aquistion is tasking in one part of the medial prefrontal cortex to process not yet acquired linguistic form and simultaneously tasking in another part to attach the meaning. To output language at this stage is for the brain to perform impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult, 3-part multitasking. Once the linguistic form and meaning have been acquired, coupled together as one task, then output no longer overly stresses the medial profrontal cortex.
This needs to be extensively discussed and researched.
I’m trying to write this in between classes, so I’m not making my research-based multitasking hypothesis clear. Let me try again:
Effort to acquire a language entails a tasking in one part ot the medial prefrontal cortex so as to process not yet acquired linquistic form and a simultaneous tasking in the other part so as to attach meaning. To output language at this stage adds a third task, which is neurologically unmanageable or at least exceedingly difficult to handle. But once linguistic form and attachment of meaning have been so well acquired as to have their management automatically joined as one task, then, and only then, does output not overly stress the medial prefrontal cortex with one task too many.
Any reaction to this attempted explanation?
I have no theoretical/scientific reaction, but thanks for explaining in your own words the research on this. Ever since hearing the input hypothesis, I have become more and more in favor of non-required output at the early levels of language study. It seems so intuitive now.
I don’t think I’m even going to require notebooks in first-year Spanish anymore (we’ll see, still not sure about that) nor will I require any answers in Spanish over 2 words. Key word: Require.
What would you do about copies of readings/stories, new vocabulary and free writes which are possible for year 1 students? Granted, I have not yet started a beginning class with tprs from Sept, since I discovered tprs last year and only implemented it after Easter for my level 1 classes. But I think having the notebook as a reference and being able to go back and re-read stories is very helpful. Some students love being able to re-read what we’ve done in class at home (others don’t but it is up to them).
“So output exercises don’t lead to output. Input leads to output.” This is an important, crucial idea and one that is often forgotten. How do we convince visiting university professors of this? A comment from one the other day was “when do the students get time to practice the language?”
And yet, Bryce, when I explain the theory behind TPRS to non-language people they go “OH! That makes sense!” They tell me they think they may have been able to learn a language if it had been presented in this way. Why is it that it’s only people in our field who have trouble grasping this?
Bryce said, commenting above on the idea that input leads to output:
“How do we convince visiting university professors of this?”
My answer is we don’t. Just leave them be. If they need to believe that students need to practice output in their 101/102 classes, let them do that. The results they get from doing output and exercises and activities speaks for themselves.