Helena Curtain is dangerous to our profession, if one accepts Krashen. Why is this?
In my opinion, Curtain has done nothing more than cobble together a lot of ideas from TPRS and mix them with a lot of last century ideas, which can’t really be done any more than we can mix oil and water.
I am not certain the ideas that Curtain has cobbled together from the TPRS community have been properly credited, either, but that’s another story.
Blaine Ray’s ideas and Krashen’s ideas work and hers don’t. Why is this? Because Curtain has watered down Krashen and is pushing some instructional ideas that are questionable in terms of being in direct conflict with Krashen, namely:
- use of the textbook
- early speech output
- use of thematic units
- avoiding direct translation
Every one of these things flies in the face of Krashen.
Let us be clear here. This is not a complicated topic. Curtain and Mimi Met fail to see the underlying truth in Krashen’s work – that we learn languages unconsciously. That statement goes for reading too. All of Krashen’s hypotheses reveal the simple fact that if the conscious mind is involved in the learning process, then the language cannot be acquired. Curtain and Met don’t get that.
That we learn languages unconsciously is a mind blowing statement to most foreign language educators in our country. If they accepted it, they would have to completely retool. This would mean they would have to loosen their grip on the textbook and actually let it go, and most teachers are just not ready to do that. So Helena Curtain shows up and tells them that they can have their Krashen cake and eat it too, which is wrong.
Curtain has watered down what cannot be watered down – Krashen. She has thrown a curtain over Krashen’s real message. She has pulled what she knows of Krashen into the realm of the textbook, and so has Mimi Met, who has had ties to the Realidades company, which is really scary.
I don’t believe Curtain and Met are doing this on purpose. I think that they really believe that they are right. But they are not, unless you agree that it is o.k. to mispresent Krashen and TPRS by calling them “tools in the toolbox” (Met’s direct words to me) when they are far more than mere tools in a box.
Whether Curtain is aware of what she is doing (she is not), the result is the same – she is offering teachers a plan that is very appealing to them, one that allows them to keep the textbook and yet claim that they are using comprehensible input and thus are aligning with ACTFL and the Three Modes of Communication, which they are not when they use the textbook.
Comprehensible input and the textbook are like oil and water, because in the one the focus of the student is fully on the meaning of the language (which allows the deeper mind to actually acquire the language in a magnificent unconscious process) and in the other the focus of the student is on the language itself, which is a conscious mechanical process, and leads to few gains by only those few students who are capable of the mental gymnastics required for such foolish work.
Krashen states that we learn languages unconsciously and Curtain can’t play with that. She is wrong to promote such a twisting of his words. The application of Krashen’s ideas in TPRS by Blaine Ray require that the entire process of instruction focus the mind of the learn fully on the meaning of what is being read or said and not on the actual language itself. This point cannot be repeated enough. Only language teachers who really get this fact will have true success with all of their students.
Any breach of that unconscious focus on meaning only causes the acquisition car to fall apart, and when that happens the class is immediately handed over to those few kids in the room who can think about the language, who can become editors, and who can get command of the mechanical aspects of the language, things like grammar and verb conjugations, to the great detriment of the rest of the kids in the room, who can only learn the language if it is presented to them in the way that Krashen and Ray have developed. But most teachers were once successful editors of the mechanics of the language, and so the beat goes on.
Nobody seems to be calling Curtain out on what she is doing. But she is a false prophet in that she has taken Krashen’s and Ray’s ideas and packaged them in a way that makes Krashen’s truths invalid. The entire product she offers, then, must ultimately fall like a house of cards, when the teachers who stay with the textbook over the next few decades lose their jobs due to their failure to align with the ACTFL standards.
Have studies been done to show the success of Curtain’s ideas, in particular the four points raised above? Where is the research supporting Curtain? Or, because she is Helena Curtain, does she not have to provide any research for her claims? Does avoiding direct translation in 5% to 10% of the class (the rest is in the target language as per ACTFL) really help kids learn better? Does early output of speech even work? Not if Krashen is right.
Diane N. December 11, 2012 at 8:15 PM [edit]
Jody’s point #2 is really coming home to me with my 8th grade class. I can easily compare them to what they were before this school year (pre-all-CI with forced output, compared to this year with CI) and can compare them to previous years’ 8th graders (pre-all-CI). It’s enough to show me that using CI as “one tool in the toolbox” defeats most or perhaps all benefit from CI. So combining approaches is as Jody says indirectly – a waste of time.
Isn’t anecdotal evidence, when repeated by hundreds of teachers who made the switch, something strong enough to use? I could take written work by my students and compare. I just graded paragraphs 8th graders wrote during a quiz. Wow! Every one has written a coherent paragraph. Most had only errors that were minor enough that a native speaker would understand easily. They used connector words (like but, and then, etc.). None of those things happened in my previous years’ classes except in one or two students, and not this early in the school year. Many times I couldn’t understand what they wanted to communicate and their paragraphs were like lists of unrelated sentences. It’s a really significant difference! If I needed to defend my changes in teaching at my own school, I would use this kind of thing. I would also demonstrate in the earlier grades, where I’m not asking for writing for grades, that more input means much, much higher levels of demonstrated comprehension (listening & reading) compared with previous years. I can show the assignments I used to give compared to assignments now.