I got this question from someone:
Hi Ben,
I’m an ESL teacher who’s been introduced to TPRS and your website recently and I really like what I see. The approach makes a great deal of sense and I’d love to make TPRS a major part of my teaching approach. I’d like to order some of your instructional materials, however, first, I want to check if TPRS is going to be suitable for the conditions under which I teach. I’m hoping you can help me with this question.
These are some of the teaching situations I encounter:
Q. One on ones or small groups of 2/3 online. The students are are a mix of advanced and high elementary language skills and will have got as far as they have without previous exposure to TPRS. They combine a fairly high degree of sophistication in English with some entrenched basic problems they can’t seem to shake.
A. Small group online won’t work, really. The method relies on large groups in person if it is to really get off the ground, just the opposite. It can work, but without as much pizzazz. But the pizzazz is not the point, really, the comprehensible input is, so it can be done. Online? I don’t know. Maybe others have experience with that.
Q. In classrooms where I either don’t know the learner’s language, or, more frequently, where the use of the learner’s language is forbidden by the school administration in the belief that English immersion is the way to go.
A. Another problem, but not insurmountable. Will you have access to a person who can attend the class who indeed knows some English as well as some of the learner’s first language? We need that little bit of English. I wouldn’t even listen to the administrators on that one. Do medical doctors take advice from hospital administrators on how they treat patients? The way it works is that we establish meaning simply by stating what three expressions, called target structures, mean in the students’ L1. This works just fine if the language of the group is shared, because the other 95%+ of the time, with brief excursions back to L1 to clarify meaning, we are in L2.
Q. What about classrooms where there is no shared language because of the wide range of students in the class. In one elementary class I had recently, there were three different Asian languages, two European languages, and Arabic!
A. I will forward this to David Young. Maybe he can address this. He makes it work and has a similar situation, actually very similar to what you describe.
Q. My understanding is that the baseline for TPRS is a beginner class where the learners have a shared language that the teacher also understands and can use as an aid to teaching the target language.
A. Yes, exactly. The misunderstanding that is now out there and a very wrong one is that the shared language is used a lot. It should rarely be used – no more than 3-4% of the time. But many claim TPRS but use L1 half the time or more and so tarnish its beauty by haphasardly mixing L1 and L2 and calling it TPRS. What we do is misunderstood by most teachers, over 95%.
Q. Do you feel TPRS can be used in the variety of situations I find myself in? Is it possible to successfully modify the techniques for use in situations that are quite far from the ideal? Do you know of other teachers who have done so and/or where I might go to find assistance? Do your yourself offer tips/work-arounds for situations that ‘challenge’ the method?
A. I believe it is a great method. Maybe the PLC members here will come up with some more answers.
Best regards,
D.C.