Friday, November 23, 2012

The research is there.

TPRS evolved because Blaine Ray considered Stephen Krashen's research into how a second language is acquired fundamental.  Today, in certain circles, it's fashionable to pooh-pooh Krashen and his Comprehensible Input hypothesis.   At the TESOL conference in Paris I heard one of the main speakers refer to it as the "talk until you drop" method.  

First of all, I have read Krashen's five hypotheses and they correspond with my own personal experience as a language learner and as a language teacher for more than fifty years.  They match what I have observed and what I have experienced.  I have seen no research or arguments that can counter that.  If you are not familiar with Krashen's work, there is an excellent summary at  http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

On the other hand, there is research to back up Krashen.  There are his own findings, but also that of others.  One of these studies that I read recently explains how the subconscious is able to grasp and apply grammatical rules that have not been explained to the students.  http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/unconscious-language-learning/ 

This is the goal of TPRS : To present the language so that the subconscious soaks up the structure and spontaneously reproduces correct language.  Students in a school system have only a few hundred hours to learn a foreign language.  We needed thousands of hours of immersion to learn to speak our native language.  It seems logical that class hours should be devoted almost exclusively to concentrated comprehensible input, that any time given to talking about grammar in the native language is wasting our limited time.  However fascinating the intricacies of grammar may be, we can not expect young learners to share our fascination.  Most young students are excited about learning to communicate in another language.  Their excitement and motivation soon die away when confronted with lectures on whether or not the genitive form can be used with inanimate subjects.  (Which is a question that not all native speakers agree on.)

I'm constantly trying to find metaphors to explain to students, and their parents, the difference between acquiring a language and learning a language.  Acquiring targets the subconscious whereas learning a language targets the conscious mind.  I recently used the metaphor of passing a driving test.  My daughter-in-law, a very intelligent, hard-working person who was highly motivated, failed her first driving test.  She had done nothing very wrong, but the examiner felt that she wasn't ready to drive on her own.  She retook the test a few weeks later and passed it.  My explanation is that the first time her conscious mind was in control and she was thinking through every action.  The examiner saw that she had not yet acquired the automatic reactions that a good driver must have.  The second time she was more relaxed because she had decided that if she failed, she would keep trying until she passed it, and she let her subconscious guide her.  The examiner saw that she had the spontaneous reflexes she needed.

Stephen Krashen calls the conscious mind that intervenes to tell us how to speak the language our "monitor".  The monitor is an editor.  It's very effective when we have produced a written text to go over it and correct the mistakes we perceive.  It becomes disastrous when we let the monitor take over our spoken language.  We hesitate, we repeat ourselves, we stumble, and we get very little out.  This happens because we are thinking more about the form than the content.  When students concentrate on content and forget form, their language will be as correct as possible, given the input they have received.  I've often noticed during oral exams, that a student will say something correctly, stop, think about a grammar rule, and then say it differently and incorrectly.  Here the monitor is intervening, hindering correct expression, like a backseat driver who hasn't seen the signs saying no left turn.

"Talk until you drop"?  There are teachers doing this.  In France teachers are instructed to use the target language exclusively.  There's no question that most English language teachers in France speak excellent English and can furnish a good model for their students.  They give input, yet their students do not seem to acquire the language.  Why?  Because they are not trained to make their input comprehensible.  I once asked a colleague with a lovely British accent to talk to one of my classes about a subject in which she was far more knowledgeable than I was.  She spoke so quickly that even I had difficulty understanding her at times and used her expert's vocabulary.  The students soon stopped making any effort to understand her.  She was not giving them comprehensible input.

I later asked another person to speak to the class on the same subject.  His English was only slightly better than theirs.  He spoke slowly and used his own limited vocabulary.  The students were hanging on every word because they were understanding him.  He was not as good a model as she could have been, but his input was comprehensible.  Teachers who talk until they drop without furnishing comprehensible input can not produce fluent speakers.  Their example should not be used to refute Krashen's theories.

Many of these teachers will tell you that their students can not follow their grammatical explanations, so that part of the lesson has to be in French.  TPRS finds that lengthy grammatical explanations are irrelevant.  Grammar is pointed out in "pop-up" questions that take only a few seconds.  It's important to note the reversal in the order.  Traditional grammar explains a rule, furnishes examples and then drills the mechanism.  In TPRS classes students hear the structure many times, and when it has been acquired, the teacher points out how it affects meaning. Because the students have already acquired the structure, it only takes a few seconds to highlight the mechanism.  So we have traditional teachers speaking in the TL for most of the lesson, but switching to the native language whenever it's important to be understood.  Doesn't that give the message to students that trying to understand is a wasted effort because anything that's really important will be in their native language?

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Hello again!

Today I went to the home of two boys that I taught in primary school two years ago.

Their mother wanted me to help them because now they are in middle school and they are having difficulties.  I sat and talked to them in English for half an hour.  I asked them if they had bicycles and we talked about their bicycles, their dog and their cats.  We talked about what they like to do, how they go to school, what they want for Christmas.  We had a real conversation.  All in English.  I was delighted to see that they had retained quite a bit of what I had taught them.  They were both using "so-so", an expression I taught and which is not in the middle school textbooks.  

I asked to see their notebooks to see where the problem was.  I saw a page where next to an example in English there was an explanation of the genitive form.  The explanation was in French.  Do you think a thirteen year old boy knows what genitive means?  Do you think the average native English speaker knows what genitive means?  Do you think that a well-educated French person who has not studied English or Latin in the university knows what "génitif" means?  

I can help these boys learn to speak English better.  We can continue to chat in English and their English will improve.  But I explained to the parents that I will not spend time helping them to do pointless exercises that are a waste of valuable class time.  Does being able to recite a rule of English grammar in French make anyone a better English speaker?

It takes thousands of hours to become a fluent speaker of a foreign language.  Students have only a few hundred hours in class.  So shouldn't we be putting that precious time to the best possible use, speaking the language, rather than talking about the language in their mother tongue?

Monday, November 19, 2012

Report on TESOL France

The conference began Friday afternoon and lasted until Sunday afternoon.  I really didn’t know what to expect in the crowd at this national conference (350 people attended). I thought I’d probably be seeing a lot of British people. And I did, but there were also a lot more Americans than I thought I’d see, as a matter of fact the President and Vice-President of TESOL France are Americans and there were several other “speakers” who were American like me. The first big surprise was that though this is TESOL France, people were coming from all over the world to attend. There were quite a few people from Eastern Europe, Ukrania, Slovakia, Macedonia, Roumainia and Russia, and there were people from Saudi Arabia, etc. I guess if you want to go to a TESOL conference, why not pick one in Paris? The three “plenary” speakers were Brazilian, Canadian and Chinese.

Most of the people present seemed to work in private language schools or at the university level. There were very few native French who taught in the French education system. I quickly realized that I wouldn’t have to convince my audience that “grammar instruction” is not the only way to go.
I discovered something called Dogme, which has nothing to do with dogma, but with a Danish film movement which was about using no artificial lighting but filming the action as it happened, if I got that right. It was interesting and I went to two talks about it. The idea is that the teacher gets her students talking and then focuses on something they say which becomes the backbone of her lesson. That is, (this is my personal interpretation) she identifies their needs by listening to their “emergeant language” and builds her lesson around a perceived need. I think we do this in TPRS all the time without asking our students to “chat” at the beginning of every lesson. But a lot of things that were said in these two talks fitted in very well with CI and TPRS. I can see how the idea of asking students to start a conversation, which would mean starting the lesson with output, would be quite difficult to justify in 1st or 2nd year, but later it might be interesting to try. And I heard favorable references to Krashen and Comprehensible Input by more than one speaker.
I also heard a speaker put down Krashen by saying he supported “the teacher talks until he drops” method and claiming that students who were taught that way never became speakers of the language. I think that his portrait was pretty much based on the kind of teachers who talk in the TL all the time without worrying about making their Input comprehensible to their students. I’ve often seen this in France where teachers are supposed to use TL all the time, and students sit through years of English classes and come out with a beginner’s level because they didn’t understand what was being said. When I did my own presentation I took care to insist on the fact that Krashen says that the Input should be both comprehensible and compelling and that TPRS was a way of doing that.
Two other interesting ideas that I picked up were “a journal dialogue” and “minisagas”. A journal dialogue is basically fluency writing where the teacher responds to what the student has written, not by correcting it but by responding to the student’s content. The teacher did this in only one class, because it was time-consuming, but had journals to show how far the students had progressed. In retrospect, I wonder how much time teachers spend "correcting" student's written production with red pens.  I doubt that responding to content rather than grammatical correction would take up as much time.  
Mini-sagas involve asking students to write a story with beginning, middle and end in only 50 words. And exactly 50 words. The idea is that they have to manipulate the language, look for synonyms, learn to make their language more effective and more precise to make it fit into the limits of a mini-saga. Again, I saw this as something that would be interesting with upper-level students.
What about my talk? It was on Sunday morning. That gave me time to “network” on Friday and Saturday.  When people saw TPRS on my badge, I had a chance to try to explain what TPRS is without boring them, kind of practicing for my talk. Sunday morning 10 o’clock was probably not the best slot, since many people living in the Parisian area only came for the Saturday activities and I heard people from out of France saying they were going to see the Eiffel Tower, and others overslept, but I had about 20 people present. There were six or seven other talks going on at the same time, so that was a fairly good turnout for something that people had never heard of before. I had 30 handouts and gave them all out because some people who had not been able to attend asked me for my handout.
I had been working hard to make my talk fit into the limits of one hour, but people tended to dribble in, so I wasn’t able to start on time. I wanted to give at least a brief demonstration of TPRS using a language people didn’t already know, and had asked a woman from Ukrania to be my teacher. She didn’t show up until the end when she apologized because she had been caught in a rainstorm on the way and had to go back to her hotel and change her clothes. But there was a woman from Croatia in the front row who graciously accepted to teach us Croatian. I gave people jobs, chose a barometer (a man from Saudi Arabia who looked rather skeptical) asked someone to tally how many times I said Comprehensible Input and tried to give them the necessary background in how the method had evolved and why I considered it a revolution, how I had first heard about it, and what it involved. Then we very quickly did the lesson in Croatian, using “has” as our structure, writing it on the board and going to “Kellie ima Rolls Royce.” We then asked people who has a Rolls Royce, What does Kellie have, we asked the man from Saudi Arabia if he had a Rolls Royce and he told us he had a Caprice (?). It could have gone on much longer, and I will definitely try this again, because the participants were really enjoying it. I explained why I chose Rolls Royce and how we use universally known brand names to adapt to beginners’ limited vocabulary.
A man sitting in the front row was nodding enthusiastically throughout the talk, but commented that he didn’t accept the Learning/Acquiring distinction and feels that learning is more important than Krashen says. I had been expecting something like this and replied that to me, having taught English to French speakers for 55 years, Krashen’s hypothesis clicks with my personal experience. And I pointed out that he was a 4%er as most language teachers are, and I proposed my own personal explanation that 4%ers are able to learn with little Comprehensible Input because we go over lessons and replay things in our heads, compensating for the lack of CI. (I know I did this all the time when I was learning French.)
Only two people had ever heard of TPRS before. One was Marie-Pierre Journaud, who is on the moretprs list and was the person who advised me to apply to the TESOL conference. She teaches native French who want to become English teachers. Since they are all 4%ers, she says that they don’t understand the importance of TPRS because they don’t realize there’s a problem. They are still assuming that their future students will be able to learn the way they did.
The other was an American university teacher who says that she had read about TPRS in a course that reviewed different methods but had never seen it practiced. I’m pretty sure that she’s going to be looking it up when she goes back to the States.
A woman came up to me as soon as my talk was over and was very enthusiastic, saying she was definitely going to try it out. She does private tutoring and said it was just the thing for one of her older beginners who kept saying, “But I don’t understand! It’s all Chinese to me.”
I had to cut off the end, because the next speaker was urgently wanting to take over the room and the participants had to rush to get to the other talks. I really regret that there was no opportunity to chat with people who were present and answer some of their questions. But at least there are 20 people who had never heard of TPRS before and are now curious.