Hi, I’m Chris Stolz. I teach Spanish, English, Social Justice, Philosophy and sometimes guitar in Surrey BC. This blog examines second language acquisition (SLA) issues, ideas, and methods.
The entries on this blog fall into our categories:
a) data-based analyses of ideas, studies, comments, etc.
b) speculation, where I think aloud, connecting my varied reading and reflection with SLA issues, etc.
c) specific suggestions for language teachers
d) satire.
I do not respond to personal attacks, straw-man arguments, arguments not based in SLA data, racist homophobic sexist etc language. Republicans and/or Trump supporters, your echo chamber is here. Claims made for SLA are backed by research; if I am missing something, please let me know; I discuss practices and ideas, not people.
I do not receive money or payment of any sort for any products or services I recommend. Recommendations for products and services from me are based on personal experience (was I able to make it work?) and product/service alignment with S.L.A. research and proven best practices.
t.p.r.s. q&a 
YES!!! This beautiful blog is filling a hole in my teacher soul. Thank you for writing these concise explanations that hopefully will be closer to the tip of my tongue when I need them, rather than coming to me on the car ride home (like usual). This is truly impressive.
Thanks. Real credit goes to Eric Herman, Ben Slavic, Stephen Krashen and Blaine Ray (and Robert Harrell). I’m just the messenger!
Hi! Do you have/sell a curriculum map? I like how you incorporate present/past starting in level 1 and am very interested!
Nope. I just keep adding sentences. We do culture via Movietalk & Picturetalk.
I am trying to find the authors of your post for a citation. Can you please help? Thank you,
dougsherer@gmail.com
Which?
Well, you. From, ” Why did Blaine Ray develop TPRS?” Shockingly, as she usually does not allow blogs as peer reviewed sources. My dissertation chair told me to cite you. Can you please e-mail me: dougsherer@gmail.com
WHich author? Which post?
Thanks for making me feel less alone out there in CI world! I teach among staunch (and insecure) grammarians who have put me down for years until magically…my students started winning stupid awards for language. It’s so hard to be a lone wolf and even harder to teach level one knowing that the students will never again have the joy of real language acquisition through TPRS. Also, keep quoting research: I’m trying to get a new teacher to see the light, but it won’t be easy. Much love to you!
Thanks! Real credit to Blaine Ray, Susan Gross, Ben Slavic, etc.
Keep it up– even if those kids end up in grammarian classes, they’ll still know that language learning can be both easy AND fun.
Mary– this post will also help you with essential background knowledge. Thanks to Eric Herman for rounding up so much data!
Hi, I don’t know your name or where you teach. I’ve been using TPRS for more than 10 years in the Toronto area and have a small group of other TPRSers interested in CI methods and discussion
Norm
I emailed you 2 years ago. Laurie Clarq knows you. You guys need to start doing workshops– Ontario seems to only know AIM for c.i. How’s life?
Where are you teaching?
Surrey
Here is a link to a video done a few years ago of me asking a story with a grade 10 class a few years ago. It might be helpful to some. Password is tprs
You didn’t include the video.
This is the link:
Whats the password
tprs
👍
Fabulous, fabulous. I hadn’t found this all before somehow, and now am sharing with new interested folks in Latvia and Russia. Thank you for your well-considered, well-documented articles here.
once again back is the incredible
embedded reading animal
the incredble M.
acquisition developer #1
ya know ya been in her class
when Russian just…feels fun
I just taught a class to too many people who already spoke the language…but they were still laughing. I’m going to hit them between the eyes (well, not really…) with your research list.
ya kochou kofye chornye mnoga!
I have dabbled in TPRS for years, and this year I have the guts to go all out 🙂
I started prepping materials for the first few weeks, but as I looked at the “stand up, sit down, slow, go, fast” word list I was thinking, “and how does this make sense when I want to teach with stories and PQA?” Then I saw your post on “how to start the year with TPRS” finally a story on DAY 1!!!! Thank you! I’m even going to try to do a mini lesson on video to show on Parent Night (which happens before I even meet their students!). I hope it will make a lot of sense to the parents and help get them on board.
Thanks for bringing together so many resources on this blog! Amazing!
I think TPR is a great strategy when used minimally. You can “front load” a bunch of vocab (stand up, sit down etc) and later weave that into stories. Eg. “cuando el chico llegó en Corea, se sentó en el McDonalds…” Blaine Ray suggests using 3rd person and not imperatives which IMHO is a good idea.
Good luck starting and let me (and the yahoo moretprs listserv) let me know how it’s going. Feel free to ask questions.
I love this blog! I’m a student teacher whose mentor follows a traditional grammar-based approach to SLA. It would drive me up the wall to have to conform to her style of teaching, but I went to go observe some other French teachers at OCSA in Santa Ana who use TPRS, and it changed my entire approach to and perspective on language acquisition. It also restored my faith in the idea that students can leave high school knowing how to speak another language.
Some of my best lessons this year were based from ideas I had seen on this website. I totally agree with what I’ve read in your #Showumine tag, especially the bit about student teachers and “how badly did I fail teaching languages.”
Thank you for this excellent resource!
Thanks, Gael. I am happy that these ideas have helped you! Good luck as you make your way into the teaching profession.
I’m enjoying reading the blog, but the “About” page doesn’t say who you are or what context you’re teaching in. Maybe all the other readers are more in the know than me, but I thought that’s what the “About” page was for, unless it’s an anonymous blog.
My son who has ADHD and slow processing speed failed a required Spanish 201 class after having received a C-. He took the class pass fail because prior difficulty and he surprisingly needed a C to pass. Is an accredited TPRS college level Spanish 201 class offered online? If so where? Thank you! TPRS sounds like a great way to learn languages!!
You should get ahold of Blaine Ray, who does teaching via Zoom. He’s brilliant.
Thank you for your post supporting CI based teaching and all the research. I am going into a meeting next week facing a bully in our dept who is insisting we agree on what grammar needs to be mastered at each level in high school. He is essentially blaming me for 9 kids dropping Spanish 3 at the semester and complaining they don’t know -ar pretérito verbs on tests etc. I need all the ammunition I can get to defend the way I teach and your post is amazing! I have other evidence such as the 2021 Van Patten paper and interviews on Liam Printer’s podcast, Martina Bex, Tea with BVP. If you have any other suggestions I would love to hear them. By the way I am in Bellingham! Pretty close to you😊
Hi Mary!
Your bully needs to read this:
https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/resources-subject-area/world-languages/world-languages-k-12-learning-standards
He then needs to show where it says “students will be able to fill out verb charts” or whatever b.s. he is thinking about.
He also needs to know that as BVP says, “verb endings, like everything else, must be acquired from the input,” and that acquisition is not linear but u-shaped.
I would also bring some writing samples.
Hello. I’m sorry if you’ve covered this in a post, but I’ve searched for it and can’t seem to find anything. I found a post where you talked about Krashen and CI etc. and I was left with the impression that you advocate input only with zero study of grammar or vocab. Is this correct? What do you think of dreamingspanish? You mention how drills are not useful, does Anki/flashcard usage count as that or can it be useful?
Thanks.
Hi Josh–
I think Dreaming Spanish is great. For many students, they will have to use subtitles, and slow playback down to at least 75% (so they can clearly hear the words).
The only issue (IMO) is that he doesn’t repeat the words enough. People need a LOT of repetition to remember things.
Thanks for the response! At the risk of annoying you, can I just repeat the question about anki? for a language like Japanese where it has a different script and such, the common advice seems to be to start by doing a deck of 1000 of the most common words as flashcards in a program like anki and doing this alongside comprehensive input, as a way to get you to a point where you can actually find comprehensive input sources (otherwise everything is completely unintelligible, especially due to kanji reading would be brutally impossible). Then they usually graduate to sentence mining, adding new words as flash cards they encounter during input as a way to help make it stick. What do you think of that, and flash card vocab in general?
Hi Josh–
There is research on flashcards (and things like kahoot, which are just digital flashcards): yes they language into ppl’s heads, provided that the learners like using them. They also work a lot more slowly than giving ppl good stories and or reading (ie comprehended input embedded into something meaningful and interesting).
With Japanese (and Chinese) you would start with a simple story (Bob wants sushi, Bob buys sushi, Bob is happy, maybe add 2 lines of dialogue). Ask this TPRS-style, then do movietalks and picturetalks with the same vocab.
THEN– once the language is embedded in their heads– THEN you introduce a written version of the story. I would personally use whatever characters, kanji bla bla bla that you need. I wouldn’t restrict the writing types, but you have to majorly restrict vocab.
There are books by Terry Waltz and Diane Neubauer about how to teach Chinese (and these will show you loads about Japanese).
Oh, and one more thing. I posted a thread on reddit about this and used one of your posts as part of it. It goes into a bit more detail about what I’m trying to understand. Maybe you’ll find the discussion there interesting. Comprehensible input with NO grammar/vocab study: the most efficient method? (yes, another one of these threads) : languagelearning (reddit.com)
Thanks again