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.