The Dangers of Forced Output

A lot of teachers who say they are "eclectic" or "communicative" have a quick glance at TPRS and say, oh, that's a lot like what I do.  And they pick up circling or embedded reading and add it as one more tool in their teaching kit.

And there's nothing wrong with that.  That's how I first got into TPRS.  But as I read more about it, followed the discussions on moretprs and went to workshops and listened to speakers at conferences, I realized that TPRS is not just a technique we can pull out of our hats from time to time.  It's a unique approach to language learning, a philosophy, a way of looking at the world that requires honesty.  You either believe that people learn to speak a language through comprehensibile input or you don't.  And once you have become a true believer, there's no turning back.

I read a few articles by Stephen Krashen, but mostly I followed his comments and arguments on the moretprs forum.  He convinced me because everything he said fitted in with my own experience, both as a learner and as a teacher.  I was taught German for nine months by a teacher using something like the Natural Approach.  (I don't remember her ever giving a name to her method.)  I must have acquired something because today, fifty years later, I can still catch the gist of a conversation in German.  I studied French, Spanish, Latin and New Testament Greek with more traditional methods and only became fluent in French through immersion.  My Spanish, Latin and Greek are long gone.

If we accept that comprehensible input is the key to acquiring language, then it follows that we need to give our students as much input as possible, to use the limited time we have with students as efficiently as possible. Asking students to produce language is what Krashen calls weighing the pig, measuring what has been acquired.  And he states quite emphatically that weighing the pig doesn't make it heavier.  In the real world we live in, it is necessary to test students and give them grades, but with as little stress as possible.  Since TPRS is concerned with what has been acquired in the long term memory and not with what the students have memorized the night before a test, it is suggested that tests be unannounced. Or regular little exit quizzes on what has been acquired during the class.

In a perfect world, students receive maximum input in a relaxed setting, listening to stories that amuse them and touch them, and one day the language just "falls out of their mouths".  In an imperfect world an inspector sits in on your class and tells you that you're being too frontal.  That you need to organize debates among your students and have them work on projects.  Teachers who feel the pressure push their students to produce language, to give presentations, to make reports.  Student output looks great in a lesson plan.  I've done this.  And sat there and cringed at the language I heard.  And felt sorry for the shy, tongue-tied student clenching his notes in sweaty hands, never once looking up.

Ben Slavic says, "Output activities should not be done until many hundreds of hours of input have occurred.  That's what the best research we have says."

I would like to make the point that forced student output is almost always incorrect, poor quality language when it is not totally incomprehensible.  Whether or not it is helping the speaker in any way, it is definitely harmful to the other students to listen to it.  When we force output, we oblige the student to try to say things that he has not yet acquired, so he mobilizes his notions of grammar, however vague, and cobbles together sentences that are neither fish nor fowl.  The damage comes when he does this often enough that it begins to sound right.  And he hears his fellow students saying more or less the same thing, so he's convinced that it is right.  Eventually the error is repeated often enough to be acquired. He writes it and his teacher underlines it in red.  His brain remembers it, because it was underlined in red.  The error becomes fossilized, and it will take a major excavation to get rid of it.

The other day I had a discussion with my riding instructor about mistakes that I make when riding.  I know perfectly well what I should be doing, my conscious mind is quite clear about what the correct position should be.  I've been taking lessons for almost ten years and I've read dozens of books. But as soon as I become apprehensive, my subconscious takes over and does what it learned to do when I first started riding.  I was sixteen when a friend of my father's put me on a horse and told me to kick to make her go forward and to pull on the reins to stop her. Until ten years ago that was my one and only riding lesson.  My riding mistakes are fossilized because I wasn't taught correctly at the beginning.  The instructor and I agreed that it's much more difficult to unlearn something than it is to learn it correctly from the start. It takes endless hours of conscious practice to erase the wrong muscle memory.

When we give our students high quality comprehensible input without forcing them to produce, we are giving them a chance to learn the correct forms from the start.  When we force them to produce before they are ready, we are pushing them to make errors that will become fossilized and be extremely difficult to unlearn.

Michael Jordan once said, "You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong all you will become is very good at shooting wrong." I paraphrased this.  "You can practice speaking eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong all you will become is very good at speaking poorly."

German update

I'm doing a long translation in a short time frame, so I don't have much leisure to post, though there are several things that I want to talk about, like forced output and why there are so many similarities between learning to ride a horse and learning to speak a language.  But I did want y'all to know that I am still working on reactivating my ancient knowledge of German.

I have finished watching "The Green Mile" in German with German subtitles.  At first I watched the same scene over and over again, trying to understand as much as possible. I wrote down words that seemed important, but I resisted the temptation to look them up in the dictionary.  

Charlotte sent me three German films to watch next.  She kindly included a short letter in English with the same letter in German.  This was very helpful and has convinced me that bilingual editions are worthwhile.  I always scorned them because whenever I picked one up I automatically read either one language or the other.  However, I poured over Charlotte's letter in German and enjoyed understanding almost all of it, looking at the English only for the few words that I didn't understand.  Please bear in mind that, being a teacher, she knew how to express her ideas in simple phrases that I could understand.

After half a dozen viewings of the first scene of the film, up to the arrival of John, I decided to watch the rest of it in one go. I also decided to stop writing down words that I didn't understand.  Instead I wrote down entire phrases that came to me and which I understood.  Because as I watch and listen, I'm beginning to realize that I'm not understanding individual words as much as entire phrases.  Ich bin müde.  Red mit John. Er pisst mich an. Du bist ein böser Mann. I'm sure that I would not have understood any of these out of context.  But when I heard them and read them the meaning was quite clear.

I'm wondering if infants first become aware of words or phrases. I've noticed that my bilingual dog, Kribi, who understands both "On va se promener" and "Do you want to go for a walk?" definitely reacts to the complete phrase.  If I say "walk" or "promenade" in isolation she cocks her head and looks quizzical, while the complete phrase has her jumping up and down and skipping circles around me. As a teacher I'm more and more convinced that memorizing lists of isolated words is a great waste of time and effort.

I feel like an archeologist, digging up vestiges of the German I learned in class 50 years ago.  I'm amazed to find so many chards in fairly good condition.  And I doubt very much that I could do the same in Spanish, although I only took one full year of German and three years of Spanish.  My German teacher spoke to us only in German and tried to make it comprehensible.  We did a lot of guessing because she translated nothing. I suppose, in 1963, that she was using the Natural Approach as it was then understood. My Spanish teacher rarely spoke in Spanish.  We memorized vocabulary and grammar rules and translated.

My impression is that my subconscious stored the German which I acquired in a distant nook of my brain, so that I'm now able to excavate it, whereas the Spanish I learned, like dust and cobwebs, has long been blown away by the winds of time.  Another difference between acquired language and learned language is that I remember my German classes with pleasure, with sufficient pleasure that I've often thought I would study it more some day, whereas I've never been tempted to use Spanish, even though I live only a few hours away from Spain, I spent part of my honeymoon in the Canary Islands and I have several friends who teach Spanish.  When I hear spoken Spanish it's just noise. I have nothing to show for the three years I spent conjugating verbs. I had good marks in both classes, so it's not a question of being successful or not.  I did what the Spanish teacher asked and passed her tests with A's.  I did not acquire Spanish.