Here in the summer I find that I am getting some good insights as I step back far enough from my work as a language teacher to see a few more things in the larger picture. I expressed some of those thoughts in the last post and extend that thinking a bit more here in this post.
The last post, describing my state of mind with TPRS/CI in 2008, was surprisingly similar to my current state of mind with the process. In that post, I noticed that I said that I was getting out of the plane that Blaine and Susie and Krashen are flying and was going back to Kansas, thanking them for the ride.
I wondered what that meant. Why wouldn’t I want to stay in the TPRS plane? Why wasn’t I content to stay in Blaine’s plane? The answer is simple. It is because we must all fly our own TPRS/CI planes and they are all different. There is no one TPRS plane. There is a fleet. I knew in 2008 that I had to go back to Kansas and make my own plane and get it flying.
What is my plane and how does it differ from Laurie’s and Michele’s and everybody else’s plane, as the airport hums with activity? It doesn’t matter! It just wouldn’t help to talk about how each of our relationships with comprehensible input differs from other people who are in the process of geting their own CI pilot’s licences.
I can only say what CI is to me. So what does my plane look like? What do I do that is unique to me and can’t be copied by others because they are not me?
My thing is simplicity and trust. That’s it. No planning. I can’t plan anymore. I did it for decades and it didn’t work for me. And no materials. Can’t have them either. Not with this work. Now, right there, I just alienated 99% of those teachers who are now looking at TPRS/CI as a way to teach. Good.
Those teachers want lesson plans and concrete steps on how to do the method. I have heard them say it countless times. I know at least three teachers who have written or are about to write curriculae to provide themselves and their colleagues with concrete curriculae. Why don’t we see those materials? Because you can’t have a TPRS/CI curriculum. As George would say, “No curriculum, Jerry!”
There are curriculae out there that provide good training wheels but if adhered to too strictly slow the CI bike down badly when it needs to go down the street on its own. When adhered to in a machine like way, such materials make a joke out of the freedom that is required to produce true and actual comprehensible input of the kind and quality Krashen describes.
Our schools don’t work. Teachers and principals run around all day trying to control. We endlessly create curriculae that don’t work, dump them, and try again. The data obsession is nothing more than the dying thrashing of a big monster which has controlled education for centuries and doesn’t want to give up its power in schools to the new, yet unborn feeling of trust in all things that we must have now that the big change is finally upon us.
My new plane, the one I am making for myself, is designed to allow me to just continue to ignore all things in my classroom that don’t have to do with is best for my kids and me. That’s it. If it’s not good for them and me, then I’m not interested. So cross off most of the technology, all of the data gathering, and get rid of the worry, too.
We have become mad with planning and with the search for the right materials in language education. But I align directly with Krashen on this. People take the simplicity of his hypotheses, which are so simple, and they scramble it. They grab the hypotheses/eggs from the nest of his research and they blend them and mix them with other shitty food and his work becomes hidden and lost.
That is what has happened with Krashen. So sad. Such a loss. This is my idea of Krashen:
- Language learening is an unconscious process and cannot possibly be taught in a conscious way.
- We need to be in face to face human relationship with other humans to learn a language so that we can negotiate meaning with them. (Krashen has said that “robots can’t converse”. The idea here is also expressed by Vygotsky in his “Zone of Proximal Development” – where infants begin to learn language from their mother’s face and in fact cannot learn its subtleties anywhere else).
- We need to be happy when we learn a language.
- Language learning is spontaneous and we don’t need a plan. If we follow a plan, it won’t work anymore than a national soccer team like Spain or Italy, who play for the European Cup this weekend, can orchestrate in advance the precise passing patterns that they will use in the game, each single pass and goal mapped out beforehand.
And yet many in TPRS/CI continue to do just that, planning their classes in the old way instead of just letting the natural process of CI happen. It can’t be done. It just can’t. No amount of technology or data gathering can help us get better at TPRS/CI – we just have to lay down that armor (that’s all it is) and open up and trust the process in the form of the Three Steps and start our classes without knowing what is going to happen. Only then can the good stuff happen.
The fact that the preoccupation with data and computers is getting worse and not better, and that so few people, after these twenty years of having storytelling available to them, actually get it going in their classes (99% quit), tells us that there is a serious crisis in alignment between language educators and TPRS/CI. That crisis is due to the need to control the process and the failure to muster up the courage to go into a class with a set of general ideas but without a checklist of things to do.
Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/02/23/oil-and-water/
