Lots and lots of people are going to workshops and conferences and starting to do TPRS or to try to teach with comprehended input. And that’s great. And those same people are out on the internet, looking for more information. More things to do in the classroom. More activities. Because it’s great to switch things […]
Archive for the ‘Drift / Is This TPRS?’ Category
It’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 […]
The need to ask
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 26th, 2016
On a social media site, a general question more or less like this has been flying around of late: Why can’t we just look at our students and gauge them that way? Why do they need to actually respond? I can already tell if they are listening and interested. The answer goes back to the […]
Posted in Drift / Is This TPRS?, Methods, Speaking/Listening 
Tags: comprehension checks 
Comments Off on The need to askCI with Local Characteristics
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 22nd, 2016
So, you believe that language is acquired through comprehensible input — repeated matching of incoming sounds (or what looks to my ignorant non-signing eyes like hand-waving, in the case of ASL) and meaning by the wonderful, ever-working brain. So every technique based on comprehensible input should work for everyone, right? Since that is a language […]
Posted in Drift / Is This TPRS?, Methods Tags: storyasking, storytelling, teacher centered Comments Off on CI with Local CharacteristicsMight, could, maybe
Posted by Terry Waltz on October 16th, 2016
As CI teachers, we know that language is acquired through comprehensible input. We know that it takes a certain amount of repetition for language to be acquired — more for structures (grammar) than for individual words. We know that this repetition can be provided either densely or diffusely — in other words in a short […]
Balance poles: only for “impure” wire walkers?
Posted by Terry Waltz on October 13th, 2016
I would normally not quote a person’s writing so extensively, but since my responses (two, on two different days) to Mr. Slavic’s post on Facebook were summarily deleted, this is the material I was responding to — this morning. (Apparently all my posts are summarily deleted. I don’t know. Seems like it.) Interestingly a colleague […]
Posted in Drift / Is This TPRS?, Methods, Outside Forces Comments Off on Balance poles: only for “impure” wire walkers?1. Pre-teach the new words with a TPRS story…
Posted by Terry Waltz on September 12th, 2016
But what IS a TPRS story, anyway? Before reading a novel, we want the students to know the language in the novel. Heck, before reading much of anything, we want the students to know the language in the reading. And in TPRS, the way we get the language into the students is (usually called) a […]
Posted in Drift / Is This TPRS?, Reading, Speaking/Listening Tags: novels, pre-teaching, targeting 2 Comments »The costume party
Posted by Terry Waltz on September 4th, 2016
Everybody loves a costume party. Especially educators. (I deliberately use this word in contrast to teachers. Teachers teach. Educators….well, they seem mostly to hold meetings, these days, and come up with new ways to say the obvious, or new Ideas that Absolutely Must Be Implemented or Every Child Will Be Left Behind. But I digress.) […]
What is targeted input?
Posted by Terry Waltz on September 4th, 2016
or, “I do not think this word means what you think it means”. Krashen (2013) argues reasonably against a grammatical syllabus, but fails to comprehend the nature of targeting within a TPRS classroom. While he admits that “TPRS probably succeeds in reducing the problems of the grammatical syllabus”, he assumes that targeting of “items” for […]
Adding Legs to the Snake
Posted by Terry Waltz on March 24th, 2016
There’s a reason there isn’t one of these in every American living room these days. Besides the fact that we’re now looking at DVDs and not VCRs, that is. On a teachers’ list during a discussion of cold character reading, a teacher recently suggested — with great enthusiasm and support — “Maybe when you read you […]