I wrote in a post to moretprs that stories became the heart of tprs via “going back to Blaine Ray’s feeling TPR fell short and deciding that getting the kids to build a story, what people here are calling story asking. BTW, in the ………… OK, I’ll deal with that in a separate post.”
I decided it would be too much of an interpolation to discuss that in that post. I posted it to the listserv b/c I wanted Shirley to see it and respond to it if she will. This I am posting just to my blog. I don’t expect everyone on moretprs to go to my blog all the time.
But here is what I was getting at. Listening to Blaine Ray talk about what happened up there in Montana or wherever he was that led him to introduce story-telling to tpr, I was struck by what a brilliant yet basic expansion on tpr that was. What Blaine did was what we now call story-asking in tprs. From that grew a variety of techniques, like PQA, circling, actors, writing, comprehension checks, etc. Those hostile to tprs excoriated it for adding new things in, a bow to the commanding presence in legacy teaching of TRADITION and THE PERFECT – the “I’ve been teaching for 78 years and have NEVER introduced the passive before the subjunctive” attitude. Upstarts like Blaine should have modestly and unassumingly presented his idea at a conference and then slunk back into the shadows to polite applause instead of starting a movement.
In 1983 a video titled A Child’s Guide to Language was made by the BBC and featured Krashen. He spoke of tpr and we saw a demo. Krashen said tpr didn’t go far enough and he went on to show immersion schools in Canada. No mention of tprs was made b/c it would be quite a while before Blaine came up with tprs. I started teaching in 1987 and my friend, Brian Barabe, latched onto tprs (we had a couple of teachers out at Phoenix Country Day School who made up materials – the coyote and roadrunner stories – Valerie March and Christine Anderson – that we used). I did not but have followed its development closely. One reason detached from language is that it seems so typical of the West. A classroom teacher with no credentials comes up with a great idea that flourishes in the wide-open West without the dead hand of the professional class of the Eastern establishment with its credentialing and standardization and hierarchies of influence. To me, tprs looks like the next dominant paradigm of fl teaching.
I hope I’ve misunderstood Shirley’s reference to dictionaries (see her post to moretprs 4/17/17), and I wanted her to clarify for me.