Terry says, “We don’t do “units” that are finished in TPRS — we do language, which is never finished, and keeps spiraling again and again as more and more of it “sticks”.” It must be extremely difficult for teachers coming out of legacy methods to realize that their curriculum is the language and so it cannot be cut up into chunks called lessons. Ellis in “SLA” says acquisition is horseshoe shaped – we acquire and then backslide and the acquire – it is not a linear process but that is what legacy teaching in every subject is based on, the building block model of learning. And yet good teachers know it doesn’t work like that.
I think that is what lies behind a lot of the questions – not this one in particular, it just got me to thinking – on moretprs, that sense of not accomplishing enough b/c it is not in divisible chunks we can call units, as Terry points out. Some students may not demonstrate acquisition until the last couple of weeks of the school year. That is unacceptable to legacy methods.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
