Human Technology

Although one might reasonably argue that all technology appears to come from humans and thus be "human," the title of this essay is meant to contrast the idea of machine technology with that which relies purely upon human brainpower.   I will argue here that in the latter realm, there is an astounding flow of human energy which is running almost unnoticed through our culture, as it grows in the ranks of foreign language teachers.

This question was recently brought into sharp awareness for me at the National TPRS conference in Minneapolis, where I experienced an adventurous week of the most profound learning experiences I have ever had.   If you're not familiar with this acronym, it stands for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling.  It sounds benign enough, but it is a remarkable thing to experience under the direction of someone who has mastered even the reasonable basics.

During four major attempts over ten years, I have tried to master this artful teaching, running into student resistance or my own weariness each time.  But the national conference is geared toward detailed coaching to help people like me, and I received a lot of generous attention for my specific problems.  Attendees experience learning from two directions: for the first three days the focus is on "Fluency Fast" classes that catapult teachers back into the realm of beginning language students.  In my session, I learned enormous amounts of French even as I absorbed the teacher's technique.  Other classes offered Mandarin, Russian or Spanish.   I was further privileged to be in a class with Blaine Ray, Joe Neilson and Contee Seely, three of the principal architects of TPRS, and since they had studied some French this way before, they made this into a multi-level classroom.  That's teacher-speak for putting all levels of students together in the same class, a rare idea that defies convention but offers the best of the old one-room school house, if the teacher can pull it off.  It would enable me to end all scheduling problems forever if I simply offered "Spanish" instead of Spanish One, Two or Three as distinct classes.

During the afternoons, sessions for novices and experienced teachers were offered that included teaching our peers while a coach stood near to guide us at key moments.  Amongst hundreds of teachers, one could not be shy about volunteering if you had come, as I did, for this coaching, and each day I got a little braver.  Near the end, the coaching sessions were even smaller and longer and every chance was a bit more of an explosion of delightful energy for me, as I unlocked more pieces of my potential ability and my confidence soared.  I learned to slow down to a level where beginners could easily process the new language.  I learned to focus on a limited number of new language structures and "circle," which is the process of returning to the same idea in fresh ways with simple yes/no or either/or questions, and how to use other question words to extract ideas from students to guide a developing story that becomes intensely personalized to the students.  I learned so many detailed ideas for making foreign language comprehensible and learnable that I was in continual awe of my teachers and coaches, and I completely convinced myself that I am capable of doing this.  I won't master it for some time to come, but the mantra of TPRS teachers is "even a bad day of TPRS is better than a day of teaching from a textbook."

I'm not going to go far into the controversy this method generates except to say that it receives a good bit of hostility from those of us who learned from a grammar-based method and have that organizational model deeply planted in our brains.  The endless complaint is that students don't know the grammar they need, which means that they can't fill out verb conjugation sheets or tell you all the names of the tenses, and that is often true, but they can speak the language lovingly.  A grammar-based education is good for the 4% of students who go on to be teachers, but it deprives the other 96% of the opportunity to reach long-term memory and become fluent.  Even that 4% will be better off in the long-run with an early TPRS education because they will speak sooner and retain what they want to know better.  One can always study the grammar road map later.

This artful educational form continues to evolve rapidly as new teachers become part of it, teaching us how to dramatize the storytelling and reading in more and more powerful ways, analyzing the process so that we can grasp smaller pieces of it and add them to our skills.  I was so overwhelmed to be in the company of such people for five days that I could not stop contrasting this with all the ways the world wants to use machine technology to get us to memorize foreign languages.  So many system administrators would have us believe that we can learn all we need to know via distance learning over computers, but that sort of technology casts a pale shadow in the light of the glowingly personal human technology of TPRS.

If you are inspired by this idea, you should know that there are beginning to be a lot of TPRS teachers and trainers around, so your chances of learning from one are growing.  If you have children learning languages in school, you might start a movement to get training for your local teachers-there are some school districts that are beginning to advertise "Only TPRS-trained teachers should apply."  Once a teacher or a whole school district really gets going on TPRS, there is no returning to the textbook method, and I find myself wondering how this little wave of change will grow and spill into world culture.  It seems completely possible to me that it will one day remind us that the potential of human technology is still where we will find the greatest progress as a species.