Well, I’ll be presenting in Taitung in October (hopefully), and at Taiwan ETA.
It’s crucially important (IMO) to realize that there is a divide between Krashen’s theory and actual classroom implementation. You can’t implement what Krashen thinks. It just doesn’t work in a classroom. That’s where it’s useful to look at actual classroom implementations of CI theory, of which TPRS is the most mature and probably has the largest mass of practitioners who are sharing results and action research.
The point is, you can teach pure CI to a highly, highly motivated adult learner with no previous background in the language. But those are rare fish indeed. That adult doesn’t need to be tricked into sitting there and taking in all that Ci. But most students in classrooms – whether children or adults – DO need to be tricked to some degree. By “tricking”, I mean the input needs to be made palatable so as to gain compliance from the learner.
Krashen also does not address (at least not in any classroom-meaningful way, IMO) the issue of fossilized errors and how to undo the damage done by rules-and-output based teaching – not to mention pressure from society at large, who all believe that since they speak, they know how to teach language (I chew every day, but you don’t see me hanging up my shingle as a dentist).
The basic premise of CI teaching is that it just takes time. The thing is, you can’t argue with the human brain and biology. It just takes a certain amount of time for language acquisition to occur (based on hours of input). We can jump-start this with judicious additions of very focused structural awareness, but that’s pretty much like tenderizing your meat – you still have to digest it, though it may be a little easier to swallow in the first place. You can rant, rave, teach grammar, and correct and force output all you want, but there won’t be any long-term acquisitional benefit from all that. The brain is still going to do what it does at its own pace.
Most programs are not set up for mastery learning – it’s definitely “we’re done with that, so if you didn’t get it, come see me after school or study more on your own or go to a cram school…” And most of the programs in Taiwan are aimed at one test or another, which are taken at a certain time in a student’s career. That’s unavoidable.
Once the test on a grammar point is finished, in most programs, it is considered to be “mastered”, regardless of whether it is late-acquired or not (and without consideration to whether or not the language has been acquired). TPRS done right is a mastery method, but one that presents many different grammar points at once (since we do not shelter structure in our input, only vocabulary) and has students acquiring all the structure of the language at once – BUT not at the same pace.
I had a discussion with Stephen Krashen about the ETA conference this year by e-mail. I suggested that I do a session on CI-friendly methods that could be incorporated into everyday “ordinary” teaching in Taiwan. He is adamantly opposed to that idea. He wanted me to demo full-on TPRS (and I wrote the proposal based on what he wanted). He believes that to change things, you have to have a revolution. I kept trying to make him understand my position, that having been in Taiwan for a long time (he has visited, but I imagine he sees what he’s shown, and he doesn’t speak Chinese) I have seen the way most classes are taught, and the way most schools are run, and things are not going to change just because someone says this method produces real acquisition. The stakeholders are not interested in real acquisition - or better stated, they are, but not more than they are interested in test scores. Test scores on discrete-item tests are something everyone can “agree” on, even if they can’t speak any English at all.
There are ways to incorporate CI techniques into a “traditional” classroom (assuming the CT doesn’t go nuts about it – which is another problem). I’ll be talking about those when I present in Taiwan in Oct-Nov. because while I would like teachers to be able to do TPRS and full-on CI instruction, unless those teachers are opening up their own school, or working at a very innovative place, it’s unlikely they would be able to use TPRS in an existing Taiwanese program. That’s just the reality of it. However, the more true acquisition can be insinuated into grammar-heavy test prep classes, the better for the long-term results.
so I think about language teaching in a different way. I come from a different theoretical perspective and a different pedagogical framework.