What Happened - Ben Slavic

What happens in schools over the years with our students is that everything becomes increasingly based on performance. Beginning in the latter part of elementary school, everything starts to become based on success and tests, and if a child can’t perform at the “required level”, they are labeled as deficient in some way and that goes deep into them with life-changing results.

So the kids move, in just a matter of a few years – about ages 8-12 (for more on that see the work of Erik Erikson) – from feeling their natural ability to acquire languages unconsciously and without effort – as the years roll by up and through middle school and then with crushing weight in high school – to experiencing language instruction under the whip of teachers who unintentionally viciously parse and judge them based on their “effort” and “ability”, which pulls them from their states of innocence re: language acquisition and the natural way to a state of being made to think that they are wrong.

This is a disaster for the students who can’t or choose not to “perform”, which accounts for about half of them or more. And yet, as stated above, nothing like what those secondary teachers are doing even exists in authentic, not fake, brain-based language acquisition.

Luckily, such memorization foolishness doesn’t occur at the elementary levels, although I have heard that some teachers actually make kids below 12 do worksheets. I am certain that when that happens it’s not due to anything more than that they don’t know what else to do.

All that will be changed by Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg’s new book on elementary CI education, which according to what I have seen so far will be a groundbreaking masterpiece and the first of its kind that will shatter the mold of elementary foreign language education in a way never seen before.

But the deviant instruction of secondary school language instructors (deviant in the sense that is strays from the research) – and this is my point in this post – is that it is a creation of the schools and so exists to serve the “school model” of education and so has no chance to align with the research.

But the problem, and the point of this article, is that the requirements put on language teachers in schools have grossly distorted their ability to effectively apply the research and to even teach in accordance with the standard, and this is all done in order to support a worn out and outdated concretized concept of language education that never even really applied to how people actually acquire languages.

Everyone can learn a language based only on the amount of time that they are exposed to it and their enjoyment of it, as Krashen has shown and as the whole thing is naturally designed to happen. There is no rhyme or reason why the school model should be allowed to pervert that research, but it does. This is discussed in greater detail below.

How dastardly to make kids think that they are stupid at languages! It is in direct opposition to the system that God designed. The elementary teachers – try as they might early on to lift up the young ones, to make them believe in their own natural capacities to play and have fun when they are learning, like they do in Finland where they don’t give homework – and then later the middle school language teachers start in with the memorization and then by the time the students become seventh graders, they are labeled as either a successful performer or as deficient.

But God doesn’t make junk. Isn’t there a spiritual side to all this, in which we try to make our best effort to serve His creation, His children, who now more than ever need the guidance of actual adults? Isn’t that our responsibility?

Or is it all just about memorization and the life of the mind? Don’t we have a responsibility to our children to give them a more complete education, which is so easy to do in language instruction compared to fields like science, although God made science too.

This is why after twenty-four years of making kids memorize the French language, I turned – eighteen years ago in 2001 – to what at that time was called TPRS. It has kind of worked for me, and I wrote a lot of books about it, but under the influence of the school model TPRS slowly changed right in front of me and it upset me deeply, so I finally left it in 2015.

Over the 14 years that I did TPRS, it kind of drove me crazy and that is in fact why I wrote all those books on it – it was just an attempt to figure it out because I learn by writing.

Here’s what happened: the memorization culture was so widespread in middle and high schools (I taught in both) that when Blaine first presented storytelling in the mid-90s, the teachers simply couldn’t handle the enormity of the change (most still can’t) that was suggested by the research. So they twisted TPRS into a model that would work for them. Thus, TPRS wasn’t really TPRS. It became something else. It gradually lost its shape under the influence of certain “experts” who were making a lot of money being experts so why should they stop and ever reconsider if what they were doing was any longer in pure alignment with the research?

This has happened to me with the Invisibles but I won’t go into that. I’ll just say that my recent book called The Invisibles and available on my website is the real thing on the Invisibles – it puts one word images, individually created images and all those other ideas of my invention in one solid and clearly explained place and it is my pride and joy, far outclassing all the other books I’ve written, including the well-received Big CI Book, and by light years.

The new false TPRS (not in alignment with Blaine’s vision) manifested especially, in my opinion, in the overuse of novels and in two other areas mentioned below (targeting and circling). (For more on this topic of TPRS as an old misshapen pillow see https://benslavic.com/blog/why-i-prefer-ntci/).

Let’s say it again: what happened to TPRS is that it lost its shape so that now it resembles an old pillow. As a result, it has turned off and broken the spirit of innumerable teachers who, initially full of confidence in their early exposure to it and so ready to sacrifice money and something much more precious – their downtime in the summer – on trainings and conferences, resulted in what they wrongly perceived as their own failure to implement the system in their classrooms.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBjtxI2p16g at 18:22.

Another example beyond the novels, and I have talked with Krashen about this, is with the TPRS technique called targeting. Blaine never targeted! I have that in an email from him where in 2015 I directly asked him that question and he said that after some reflection in response to my email he never did. Another example is with circling. In natural speech there is no circling.

Those middle and high school teachers just were unable to “go there” with the research from 1995 to now, so they twisted it in their favor. They made it align with the school model. They couldn’t jump across the chasm that separated comprehensible input from the gray cliffs of memorization of word lists directly into the bright and pure naturalness of Krashen’s research. Their dark and tomb-like classes reflected that failure, which stained storytelling until, very slowly over two and a half decades – and I know this because I saw it slowly get worse and worse over the years – it didn’t resemble Blaine’s original vision at all.

So I left TPRS and tried during those decades to develop and align my own instructional practices with Krashen’s natural vision and over time I came up with the Invisibles and NTCI. It worked. But God what a struggle. I never want to go through anything like that again.