On another TPRS-focused list, someone recently posted: Terry Waltz, a staunch proponent of what I would call Classical TPRS, has said many times that TPRS takes a lot of practice and has a large skill set to master, and therefore she asserts that new practitioners need hours and hours of training and coaching, to begin […]
Archive for January, 2017
The piano played a wrong note
Posted by Terry Waltz on January 22nd, 2017
On a blog post, someone supporting the idea of untargeted “story listening” recently described a teacher’s performance delivering a targeted TPRS story (one for which the language to be emphasized was known before class started) thusly: …my targeted stories are about as personalized as a Mad Lib activity. Sounds to me kind of like someone […]
Target language math
Posted by Terry Waltz on January 19th, 2017
10 minutes of 60% comprehensible = 600 comprehension-units, and we don’t know if the meaning to language matches are correct or not. 9 minutes of 90% comprehensible = 810 comprehension-units, and we know all of them are correct. That 1 minute of English is well used, not abused. And for those who have doubts whether […]
Posted in General, Methods 
Tags: 90%, comprehensibility, target language 
Comments Off on Target language mathIt’s baaaack
Posted by Terry Waltz on January 3rd, 2017
I’m afraid I do not see sufficient elemental differences between “story-listening” and anything else to consider story-listening an independent method. It’s TPRS 1.0 coming back, like the miniskirt, and has the same disadvantage: that all the varied bodies in question have to happen to fit the skirt for it to work, because like very early […]
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?
Posted by Terry Waltz on January 3rd, 2017
How central to a method does an “element” have to be to be an element of that method? On an internet group, I recently spotted a comment that went something like this (I can’t find it at the moment): I like a lot of the elements of [hot new method]. So I do [hot new […]