I know you directed this post to Terry, Lance, but your concerns are what prompted Brian Barabe to post routinely to the listserv the basics of tprs. People seeking to set up a tprs lesson can check off from the list those things they are doing and then question other stuff of theirs that is left. To me, that has always seemed to be a way of preventing drift. We had a long discussion on this a long time ago, the idea of drift, and there is always the charge of squelching innovation to be wary of and then there are the people who are sure some notion of theirs just MUST be true……… and so on. But if you WANT to stay within tprs boundaries, a check list is paramount.
Pat Barrett

From: Lance Piantaggini lance.piantaggini@gmail.com [moretprs]
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 1:23 PM
To: moretprs@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [moretprs] Re: Shelter vocabulary not grammar

Terry, setting aside the Circling example, I am mostly concerned with the following:

…Is the idea of TPRS repetition that 1) the high frequency vocabulary (i.e. structures/phrases) will be repeated in order to hear/read the language’s grammatical structure, or that 2) structures/phrases will be repeated in order to acquire those specific grammatical structures?…

These have different implications. I get the impression that teachers are becoming obsessed with *getting reps* to the point of being predictable and unaware of their surroundings. That is, instead of keeping things compelling, their goal is reps. Instead of expressing meaning to students, their goal is reps. Instead of finding out what students are interested in and discussing it, their goal is acquisition of specific structures/phrases. Are you seeing this, too?

Lance Piantaggini