Before 1990, we had stuck language learning up in the brains for so long with the book. Then Blaine applied Krashen’s ideas on purpose in the early 1990’s. For Blaine it was a wonderful process which for him in the earliest days was highly intuitive and aligned so nicely with SK’s work that an instructional flower bloomed. Everybody wanted to do it when they saw Blaine do it.
But Blaine is highly intuitive and never really targeted much of anything – I have this from Blaine personally and Russ Albright saw the deal too and wrote about it heresome months ago:
https://benslavic.com/blog/russ-albright-on-the-invisibles/
However, the people who first started being Blaine’s disciples weren’t so intuitive. They took what Blaine was doing – just flowing with his own naturally unconscious style and tried to turn it into a conscious process, because they were teachers and so they thought they had to teach. But WE CAN’T DO THAT because the process OCCURS IN THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND.
This in my opinion explains where TPRS failed with the (not hugely intuitive because of the way they were trained themselves) general population of foreign language teachers who took what is a natural unconscious process and tried to make it a conscious process. No blame. It looked like it might work. But each year brought new additions and the method became very top-heavy. T1 happened. And then T2.
Misreading Blaine’s intuitive approach and trying to shift it to the arena of the mind represented a kind of pulling back of the new Blaine hot air balloon to the ground. Blaine’s system, TPRS, was meant to fly, but the teaching moved more and more into the students’ minds mainly because of the need to align with school curricular models that demanded structure and a more conscious apporach to acquisition.
A balloon is not meant to be enjoyed on the ground (you can’t keep your instruction (a) in the mind and (b) aligned with a curriculum) when it is designed to work in the wide open spaces and vistas of a natural and highly capable unconscious landscape, one that is FAR MORE CAPABLE than the conscious mind. P
Another way of saying it is that if you don’t trust the process of language instruction by handing it over to the unconscious to be centered in the heart then the process will get all gummed up. The balloon will remain tied to the ground. That is my take on why TPRS failed. The twenty year shift to conscious analysis, fueled by the previous century of using a book and filling in blanks to learn, and also fueled also by a growing interest in data which has hit its zenith in recent years, grounded what Blaine was doing.