More thoughts during this nice time of recent reflection in the soft month of June:
Honestly, I always have tried to understand why I have been so angry at traditional teachers. After all, I was one of them myself for 24 years and I got away with not aligning with the research and the standards because back then all people did was teach the Table of Contents in the textbook.
I remember each year excitedly telling my classes – this is a true fact – that when we got to level 3 we would get to finally study relative pronouns so that was something to look forward to. (To me, relative pronouns and the pluperfect subjunctive are things of great beauty.) And so what if I only had four people in French 4? They all passed the AP exam as long as I worked hard enough so it was all good, right?
I can see why many TPRSers currently use stories to teach the grammar and thematic unit lists and other targeted versions of the language. If it wasn’t in contradiction of the research, I might still be teaching to those lists/objectives/targets myself – why change?
But teaching grammar is not in line with the research OR the standards. So anyone doing it has to stop. That is why I finally turned to non-targeted instruction. I don’t think that when we target instruction to align with curricular, S/S and pacing guide documents that we are aligning with the research and only in a fake kind of limited way do we align with the Communication standard.
Full disclosure, I have always been a NT teacher, an outlier hiding among the T1 TPRSers. I knew Krashen’s research, and I stuck with it. (His research in my view it is not about T1 and I don’t even know why he doesn’t just come out and say it.)
What to do? Well, if the TPRS people aren’t going to change, and if Krashen isn’t going to make them change, and if Blaine isn’t saying anything, and the whole thing is turning into a kind of same old same old where teachers try it and quit, I figured I would just do what had always been in my heart about finding ways to do free and unfettered communication with my kids and that led to the Invisibles.