There was a posting on the moreTPRS Yahoo groups group around 2-3 months ago, if I’m not mistaken about the time, with a response to TPRS teaching written by a student. I can’t come up with it right now, though. I’ve posted to the list asking if someone could point it out to me and I’ll post a link here when they let me know where it is.
OK, somebody gave me the link to the original post.
I don’t think you can access the Yahoogroups post without joining, so I dumped the entire text of the post into a pdf file and put it up on one of my sites. You can download it here:
It’s unedited and I had nothing to do with writing it. I suspect that anyone writing something like this for their own teacher might be just a tiny bit biased but overall her thoughts seem fairly balanced.
[quote=“ironlady”]OK, somebody gave me the link to the original post.
I don’t think you can access the Yahoogroups post without joining, so I dumped the entire text of the post into a pdf file and put it up on one of my sites. You can download it here:
It’s unedited and I had nothing to do with writing it. I suspect that anyone writing something like this for their own teacher might be just a tiny bit biased but overall her thoughts seem fairly balanced.[/quote]
Thanks ironlady. It seems as though TPRS is very similar to the communicative, topic-based teaching that I was trained in in the late eighties. :s From the students’ perspective at least. Are people still teaching chalk and talk, grammar, exercise and test-based foreign language classes in the West? That’s depressing.
I think that CI sounds more radical and experimental - I don’t suppose there are any student responses to this - or a pointer as to where I might be able to find them?
[quote=“Petrichor”]
Thanks ironlady. It seems as though TPRS is very similar to the communicative, topic-based teaching that I was trained in in the late eighties. :s From the students’ perspective at least. Are people still teaching chalk and talk, grammar, exercise and test-based foreign language classes in the West? That’s depressing.
I think that CI sounds more radical and experimental - I don’t suppose there are any student responses to this - or a pointer as to where I might be able to find them?[/quote]
TPRS is CI. And I really can’t imagine that TPRS is similar to the communicative approach. We do things completely differently – the “grammar-based” approach described below is communicative from the 1980s-1990s. Where are you getting your impression of what TPRS is and concluding it’s similar to communicative approach? The basic premises of the two are completely opposite – communicative approach still holds that students learn rules and vocabulary and then output them to learn, while TPRS, being a CI method, holds that comprehension is first needed before large volumes of repetition will cause acquisition. Grammar is grammar in communicative classrooms, whereas grammar is treated as meaning in a TPRS classroom.
In fact, TPRS teachers are often criticized by traditional teachers for NOT being topical. The TPRS method does not fit well with unit-based teaching, since we don’t like to teach highly similar words all together, which is what happens when you have “the family” unit or “the time and date” unit or stuff like that. At the higher levels, TPRS relies more on reading, and isn’t focusing on basic acquisition of the most common patterns, so with more language under the students’ belts, they move more toward more topical work as they are able to read pieces that deal with a topic and discuss them. The difference still lies in how language acquisition is handled – there is still circling of new structures even in higher levels where reading is going on. That would never happen in a communicative classroom – it would be a grammar lesson.
Someone posted another student response to TPRS on the Yahoo groups “moreTPRS” list today – maybe interested parties should just register for that list to view it and any more that might come up? It’s not like your e-mail gets sold or anything, at least. 
Yes. My father was learning German in Australia. He went through two different places, one of which was the Goethe Institute, I believe. From what he told me, it sounded like that’s how they were doing it.
[quote=“ironlady”]You can download it here:
It’s unedited and I had nothing to do with writing it. I suspect that anyone writing something like this for their own teacher might be just a tiny bit biased but overall her thoughts seem fairly balanced.[/quote]
That was an interesting read. She sounds like she’s having fun and learning a lot, which is exactly the point with language learning.
However:
This just depresses and frustrates me. In terms of teaching English (as you well know from your own time in Taiwan) it’s topical from day one here. And it only gets worse. I’ve tried to incorporate CI into my buxiban and adult classes here, but what with the adherence to schedules and needing to finish a certain unit or topic in how many ever hours it’s a strain at best, and near on impossible at worst. With weaker students, where I’ve been able to incorporate it (sneakily) into the lessons, I have found that it definitely helps them. But the frustration comes in that the students have a certain expectation (grammar and tests), and this is reflected in the teaching methods the schools expect from the teachers.
I’d like to just start with my own private class of a few students and build up from there and eventually have my own school using CI. But I suspect it will be hard to impossible to get parents to buy into the idea.
In terms of Chinese learning, it’s even more difficult to try and get a Chinese teacher to buy into the concept and have them teach you using CI. Even if you explain the fundamentals of what you want, they still keep trying to fall back on the traditional approach. 