We come to input based instruction with unnecessary trepidation. We think that it is too difficult, but it is not. We merely make it difficult by bringing older models of instruction to this new model, mixing them. It is not necessary.
We must lose the notion that that we have to teach certain things, to target certain vocabulary. We are afraid that if we don’t make some kind of list of words that our students should know at a certain level, then those words won’t be learned. It is not true.
The most common words, the ones that we feel we must teach, are so common that they will be acquired via our natural speech with our students anyway. All of the easy words will be learned in a natural way, because they occur so often.
It’s not as if we are going to spend the first year of instruction, for example, talking about the Nouveau Roman. Those AP conversations will only occur later, of course, but only if the students have been exposed to massive amounts of French early on. W ith all due respect to teachers who use “eclectic” methods, such approaches just don’t get the massive flow of language necessary to get real language acquired.
I am convinced, moreover, that the lack of CI taught in regular foreign language classrooms is the primary reason that the money-loving College Board dropped the AP French Literature exam.
Language unfolds naturally. We don’t need to get all bent out of shape about it. Students who don’t know words learn the simplest ones first, and, as the CI train rolls through the classroom class after class, those students naturally end up with strong vocabulary and those three or four years of input training naturally lead to more and more advanced levels of conversation and reading and writing.
But we push that agenda. We actually worry whether our students wil acquire these words. That’s messed up. Not trusting in the magnificence of language and in its powerful natural unfoldment is a sad reflection of our national obsession to not trust life, which I call war.
The lists we make fool us into thinking that we are doing our jobs well, that we are getting out there and grabbing the bull by the horns and working hard and all of that hooee. We wear ourselves out being good teachers. But we work harder, not smarter.
Our fear of our students’ not learning anything is at the root of this. Were we to teach our students from a place of joy, they would see that and respond in kind, instead of turning off the channel. TPRS teachers know this. They know that kids only really pay attention when the lesson plan is no lesson plan.
We think that we are in control, but we’re not. We don’t trust that if we just use SLOW, Point and Pause, and Circling in PQA and in stories, without having much more of a plan than that, that our kids won’t learn. It is so sad.
We especially don’t trust what Krashen basically laid out in The Power of Reading, that the more you read the better you get at it. We don’t trust the simplicity of that idea, and so we make reading complicated, too. We come up with things that we call “reading strategies”, part of our bag of tricks, but those very strategies just make us, again, work harder, not smarter.
Isn’t it about time to let go of our fears in TPRS, and quit borrowing trouble and extra work? There is nothing to fear – TPRS done properly works in a natural way that, though unplanned, is extremely powerful in terms of raw acquisition. TPRS teachers take MUCH less work home. I never take ANY work home, and yet my students learn the language.
It would probably be best if we do one of two things: either let our fears go and trust in the process of TPRS to the best of our ability, without making it all complicated, or we just let the method go and return to the old clutching of the textbook and the conjugation charts. We should not mix them.
We should ride the TPRS bicycle by looking up and seeing the beautiful sights that pass us by on the ride, instead of looking down at the bike in fear. Fear and the old ways of teaching language are close friends, but TPRS is not ken to fear.
So, if we ecide to embrace TPRS, then we should probably let go of the fear and all of the obsessive planning and all of that stuff that, in spite of the ridiculously hard work of tens of thousands of teachers, show results that one could characterize, to use a term borrowed from education, as piss poor. It is the students of TPRS teachers who are getting passing grades on the AP exams after only a few years of language, not the students of traditional “I work really hard” teachers.
Just hanging out with the kids, just relaxing in the flow of language, just having fun, is not the way of fear. On some level, we all know this. We know that this is not meant to be the century of fear. The century of fear is over – wasn’t it enough, do we want more fear – and we don’t have to deliver such a piss poor product via such blindingly hard work any more. We can finally relax – we know the way to do that now.