Short Dictée/Dictation as Notes

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82 thoughts on “Short Dictée/Dictation as Notes”

  1. I’m so glad this came up, because I find it 100% necessary with the population I teach (replacement and collaborative classes). In particular, I’m trying to build a repertoire of “active” CI activities. I am not referring to kinesthetic activities like TPR, but I’m thinking more of ways that the students can be actively doing something (beyond choral responses) to maintain focus. The dictation is a go-to, but I’d like to come up with more. I like Eric’s idea above, and I think it makes a lot of sense to punctuate bursts of CI with more active tasks. Even if these activities seem “diluted” relative to our ideal version of CI, it seems they are necessary. I love the idea of pausing for a quick dictation or drawing. Any other ideas? One problem that I come across is that I usually don’t allow students to have anything on their desks. How do you all deal with this? When the pen and paper are on the desk, doodling is an issue, and if they are not already on the desk, the “quick” writing activity becomes a major detour. Thoughts?

  2. This spring semester I started handing out a copied page with the days of the week typed on it. Each day anything we wrote went on this one page. Dictation, structures, goals, mini quizes, etc. went on one page per week. In my school we must give 2 grades per week and this made this task much more simple. Sometimes I retold a story and then they would draw it as I said it. I always kept it short, like this dictation idea y’all are talking about. I will include this activity next year. At the end of this year they could see what we have done over the semester on 18 pages. Also I could copy one each week for my records, so it saved me time as well.

      1. I thought that it was a great idea too but I did not come up with idea. I learned it from Scott Benedict. I just adapted it to my classes. I have always had my students keep a 3 ring binder so that they can put readings, notes, and other papers into it. I have them seperate it by months. At the beginning of the year we label tabs with the months so that it is ready for the whole year. I used to take up notebooks, in the old days, and give them a grade because I didn’t use textbooks and I wanted to make sure that they had the information with them. My mentor teacher that I had my 1st year teaching showed me that I could use a textbook or not. We got rid of the textbook mid 2nd semester and I loved the freedom that it gave us. I guess this is one reason that it didn’t seem overwhelming to switch to TPRS. I am grateful to have had that mentor teacher start me on my way.

  3. ” allowing them to briefly spend a few minutes in the part of their brains in which they feel most comfortable – the analytical part. ”

    This is important to acknowledge, and I think we are ready to hear it now, whereas we would not have been open to these kinds of things even a year or two ago–or at least I wouldn’t have been. Diane (not sure if she’s on the PLC, so I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but she’s a great resource for CI wisdom) recently told me she is taking breaks to conjugate verbs, you know, the chanting of soy, eres, es, etc. If they know what these words mean, if they enjoy it, and if they will need to know it in this way for a placement test or another teacher they will be with, then there’s really nothing wrong with it, even from a ci perspective.

    1. Jeffery Brickler

      I recently sent Ben an article to post here, but this thread is getting at what I wrote to him. I have been feeling the results of students inability to listen and focus. They have been so trained to do school that they don’t know how to deal in this unconscious process nor do they even believe it can exist. I am really interested to hear members thoughts on how to get the students doing something so that they will buy in more. In my opinion-granted I have less experience in the method-students need to work with their conscious minds in class to “feel” like they are doing something. We know it doesn’t help, but we need them to “buy in” so that they will get out of their own damn way.

      1. And Jeff that new article from you on the topic of those two girls and how to deal with them, so fascinating and intense because we have all been there, if not to the degree you describe, is jammed in the queue with so many others. Have we even published the first one describing those two girls? I can’t remember.

        However, what you said above really gets to the point:

        …I am really interested to hear members thoughts on how to get the students doing something so that they will buy in more. In my opinion…students need to work with their conscious minds in class to “feel” like they are doing something. We know it doesn’t help….

        I completely agree with this. We need to survive kids whose ability to think rigorously – as defined by our rigor charts on the posters page of this site – has been compromised by their experience of memorizing things in school year after year, and we need to survive kids who are just not motivated.

        That is not how the process of learning a language was meant to occur. It was meant to be a celebratory and unconscious process (Krashen) without a shred of memorization. But in schools, like those two girls you told me about, we have all seen those left brain dominant students who put up walls and then accuse us (not to such an extreme degree as you had to go through this year, which will shock the group). Those students MUST be dealt with.

        Hence, we do whatever we have to in order to get buy in from the kids, including dictation for certain classes if they can’t do freewrites because they can’t listen, because the chemistry of the class is that way, and we go about the business of protecting our sanity and our jobs before we go so far out on the TPRS/CI limb that we end up fighting with people who don’t know what we do but who have power over us.

        We can’t fight all the time and learn this method. We do what we have to do to survive. I will ask that we wait on your full internet story – it’s so insane that I think it will do you good to get empathy from the group on it – and together we will communicate via email to get your story out to the group over the next few weeks, when the queue starts to move again.

  4. Ben, you said “Dictée as a writing practice brings far less gains than freewrites, and the listening input it provides is of a lower quality.”

    I’m wondering what you consider to be the gains from freewrites. The only times I have ever tried free writes I have gotten writing with lots of errors. I really couldn’t care less about these errors because they are either things that will take care of themselves with more reading (i.e., spelling) or things that show me that my kids haven’t gotten enough aural input yet (i.e., word order, article use, etc.). But, up to this point the only benefits I’ve seen in freewrites are: 1) letting the kids see how much they’ve acquired/how easy it is to write after all the input they’ve gotten 2) letting me evaluate what my kids have acquired well/not well, which just informs my teaching and 3) as a focusing activity for antsy classes or for dragging days that has the previous two side-benefits. But I never thought of freewrites as having any real benefits in terms of acquisition. I’m guessing by “benefits” you are referring to some other kind of benefits? I’d like to know if I’m maybe missing something on freewrites in terms of acquisition.

    Also, about the quality of input from dictées being lower, do you mean lower than “regular” (i.e., during PQA or a story) input? I’ve always thought of dictées as being better than regular input, if only in terms of the slowness and focus it encourages. But maybe the lower quality comes from the fact that “compelling” and “meaningful” go down a bit since the activity is more academic than pure PQA/Stories. But if I’m giving the dictée with new info (using already acquired words/structures), then the compelling component would still be there in my view since the kids are discovering things about a classmate for the first time. I’d like to know your thinking on this.

    1. You asked Ben, but here’s what I think are also reasons for Quickwrites, also perhaps better called Fluencywrites. These are fluency activities that have the purpose of increasing the speed and which has the result of increasing accuracy, especially when the same write or talk is repeated. When it’s output fluency activities as in Quickspeaks (see the 4/3/2 oral fluency activity I described on the forum or google it) or Quickwrites, we are getting them to increase their skill at accessing what they’ve already got in their unconscious mental representation. Some SLA researchers would consider acquisition to be the development of the unconscious system + skill.

      In order for these to be fluency activities the students have to be able to complete them quickly, which means the content has to be easy and familiar (98% comprehensible). They have to be able to be successful at the activity! (why I delay fluencywrites until 2nd semester or later – until then I do Speedtranslates). Paul Nation, vocabulary acquisition researcher, argues that 25% of class time should be afforded to fluency programs, which also include Quickreads (Speedreading) and Read-alouds. I imagine Quicklistens could be completed just as speedreading, only aurally. Next year, I plan to have all these components and to have students graph their own progress. These activities only take a short moment. And they would build student confidence!

      Dictations just don’t deliver the same quantity of CI and they get kids focused on form, not meaning. Couldn’t students complete a dictation and not understand the meaning of the phrase?

      1. According to Swain’s Output Hypothesis, students become aware of the language that they lack when they try to use it. It helps students to try to pay attention to those gaps. Free writes are one way to output in a safe environment.

        A dictation, I would see as a form of structured input. The student does need to focus on meaning to attend to form. Today during my diction a girl wrote “sel evanta” for “se levanta.” Other kids wrote “se levanta” obviously one was able to process the meaning (or maybe they both were). I don’t know how compelling my argument is, but the people who wrote “se levanta” knew how to encode aural input meaning there must be comprehension–right? Then again, we can always ask, “so what does this mean?” to be sure.

        1. Drew, That is an interesting example. I think that the strongest statement that we can make is that the “se levanta” kids have the spelling/word-division, while the “sel evanta” girl doesn’t. So it seems to indicate some difference, but as you hint, to know for sure that each kid understands the utterance to mean “gets up” must be proved otherwise (English equivalent). I can imagine kids being accurate on the spelling of “se levanta” without knowing the meaning, as well as kids mastering the use of “se levanta” with less grasp of spelling conventions.

          I still have this sense that the greater the mastery of the language the faster and more accurately one can take dictation.

          1. What I did yesterday on my first dictation with my new class (the first one was half Spanish speakers half English speakers so I told them I refuse to teach that class–my new class has all non-native speakers) was do the dictation with the three sentences and then have them DRAW in a quick stick figure what each sentence meant to them. Then I had them share drawings to make sure that each person got the same encoded message.

            Now for their notes, they have a sentence in Spanish and a drawing to aid in recall.

        2. Drew, your reference to Swain’s Output Hypothesis has had me thinking. Over the last year and a half I have been working at modern Greek. As I try to express myself I become brutally aware of my gaps. To put it in CI terms, gaps in output make me aware of the need for more input. To put it in traditional terms, gaps in output mean that we need to study/teach/practice more.

          1. I like the way you say that “make me aware of the need for more input.”
            Maybe after a free write the instructor says: “Highlight one sentence that you think would be difficult for a native speaker to understand.” The kids re-read their work and determine their own gaps of fluency. The teacher can collect them, peruse them quickly and select one for a OWI or something… I’m good at thinking on my feet so I could get something out of it. Since it’s already a created story, the teacher could do a retell and then circle the problematic structure.

          2. This brings me back to Krashen who says that one acquires language through input and not output, but Swain contradicts that by saying students need to realize their gaps to make gains.

          3. Not sure Swain says exactly that. I think Swain has proposed a more moderate hypothesis, that input is necessary and output of the right type can also be beneficial. I found Wikipedia to have a good summary of her Comprehensible Output (CO) hypothesis, which also includes Krashen’s objections.

            This idea of “noticing” gaps comes from Richard Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis. John Truscott, the researcher who adamantly stands against written and oral error correction, attacks the noticing hypothesis and writes that it would only make a difference for metalinguistic knowledge, not linguistic competency.

            Krashen has written convincing arguments against the CO hypothesis and other non-CI SLA theories here:
            http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/comprehension_hypothesis_extended.pdf
            http://www.finchpark.com/courses/tkt/Unit_10/comprehension.pdf

            It appears as though output is not necessary for SLA and whether or not it plays a direct role in enhancing SLA is disputed.

            Also, be careful of your use of “structured input.” That has a specific meaning, at least in terms of processing instruction. It has to do with forcing a student to focus on form in order to get meaning and there are very specific steps in the design of structured input in order to ensure this happens. Not sure dictation does this. Sure, if you have them translate or draw what they’ve transcribed, then that adds a meaning element, but it still may not be structured input in the VanPatten sense of the term. There may be ways to make a dictation fit the requirements of structured input.

            And Drew, I’ve been watching your video demos during my lunch breaks. I love your style and sense of humor!!!

      2. Greg I agree with Eric on the purpose of free writes. He said:

        …we are getting them to increase their skill at accessing what they’ve already got in their unconscious mental representation….

        This is exactly what I think about the value of freewrites. My students must, when doing freewrites: a) pull information from wall charts, and b) pull sounds that they have heard repeated in class many times up and out of their deeper minds where all those reps lie. That is hard work and makes them get in touch with their own deeper memory banks. It is higher order thinking and rigor of great value and will lead in the upper levels to actual writing, not the fake and stilted kind we have been teaching for hundreds of year with the old way. That alone is a reason to do them.

        I also love what Drew said about this. I don’t know Swain but I certainly resonate with this from Drew, which is kind of what I was trying to say above:

        …according to Swain’s Output Hypothesis, students become aware of the language that they lack when they try to use it. It helps students to try to pay attention to those gaps. Free writes are one way to output in a safe environment….

        I also agree with this from Eric:

        …dictations just don’t deliver the same quantity of CI and they get kids focused on form, not meaning….

        This is most important for us to get out on the table, since we really haven’t done it here. I am afraid newer teachers are getting a false read on the value of dictation. In my opinion, for every dictation we do, we should do five or more freewrites.

        Dictations are best used for classroom management. This goes back to the crucial thread that seems to have been going through these pages for years now, that we don’t have years to teach our kids languages, but that the language acquisition process/LAD is programmed to only work when plenty of years are available, when we only have in our school settings, really, only a few hundred hours. Since we don’t have all that time, we must maximize the input, which dictation is not since it gets the kids consciously focused on form, as Eric said.

        How does the point about the amount of time needed for fluency relate to dictation? Dictation as output wastes time but shuts kids up. Not one of us can argue with the value of that tool when faced with a classroom of largely unmotivated kids. That is why I strongly support Drew’s new idea of short dictations in the middle of class that we talked about just this week here. It is a perfect bridge through class, a kind of brain refocusing process.

        Kind of rambling here but the point is that dictation is less a pedagogical tool than one that we can use for classroom discipline. If we actually want the kids to learn how write, we do freewrites and we don’t grade them and the kids do the freewrite, count the words, fill in their bar graphs, watch the bars go up each month, and we show those graphs to parents and administrators at the end of the year, and the kids never graded or focused on the form of what they wrote, and everyone is happy and we all go home for the summer.

        Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/category/freewrites/

        1. Ben, I’m catching your response just now during my planning….thanks! This clears things up for me re: Freewrites, especially the point that they provide a situation where kids have to access their “deeper memory banks” like you say above. I’m looking forward to making Freewrites a more regular part of my classroom routine now that I’m seeing how they can really benefit kids accessing that deep memory. Definitely food for thought.

          I’m wondering also about doing a mix of timed Freewrites and untimed Freewrites (though I’d have to figure out how to do untimed writing logistically). Whenever I’ve had to write something off the top of my head in a timed situation, like during the timed writing section of the French Praxis which I retook a few weeks ago for my New Jersey certification, I hit mental blocks and can’t remember words that I know I know. Have you (and anyone else) experimented somehow with untimed writings -and, if so, have you noticed a difference in writing quality compared to timed writings?

          1. I also have a question about fluency writes. I was told that my students should write one every week or they don’t advance as much. I felt it would become stressful or boring to students every week so I had them do 5 or 6 this year in Spanish 1. The first one was in December. I don’t think that I will start until 2nd semester next year. It was novel enough that they did really interesting stories. Many said that they would not like to do it every week. So I’m just looking for some advice for next year. Since this is my first year with fluency writes I wonder what experience y’all have with them.

          2. Starting second semester in level 1 through level 4 I do every other week. Essentially that’s about 8 a semester.

            But I also do quick writes at the end of class (5 mins): retell this story as best you can.

            I only grade free writes for word count and the kids graph their progress. John Hattie in his book Making Learning Visible (2008) says that one of the best ways that a teacher can affect his classroom is to have students chart/document/reflect their own learning.

            Every once in a while (when I don’t have homework for my masters class) I will grade a set of free writes for fluency/fluidity. Essentially a 3 for a native speaker would understand or a 2 for I get it–but someone else wouldn’t. (And a 4 for–you blow my socks off).

          3. Melissa and Greg I think it depends on what you want your kids to emerge with at what level. If you want lots of good writing skills by the end of level two then maybe do that once-a-week idea.

            (Melissa I don’t know where you heard that one freewrite a week idea but it is far too much in the first two years, in my opinion. I would say once a month.)

            What do we value? I value input and so my kids this year wrote one freewrite, but don’t tell anybody. They did one dictation. Even those were frustrating to them, as most are learning their third language and still struggling with learning how to write in English.

            Maybe in some suburban schools where there always has to be proof of learning kids would write more. But at the first two levels, with what we know from Krashen? I think it’s a bad idea. We always must keep in mind that many thousands of hours of listening and reading input are necessary, in my opinion, to produce any decent writing at all.

            Greg on the untimed writes I don’t do them. I just give the kids the ten minutes. Really, the only value of those is that they kids get practice in dredging (unconscious sound into conscious writing) and the value to us is that we get to show artifacts (the bar graphs) at the end of the year to prove we are good teachers.

            I am not even familiar with untimed writes – to me it would seem to kind of defeat the purpose because when the kids aren’t on the clock they would tend to drift back into their conscious minds while writing, which would defeat the purpose accomplished by timed dredging, and return their focus to form, which is what we don’t want, since the big secret to our success as language teachers is our students’ continued focus on meaning over form, because we know that form will emerge just fine once the deeper mind has had enough hours (all those thousands) focused on meaning, and that was my run-on sentence for the day.

          4. Thank you for this reply. That was what I felt about output. I don’t believe writing more will make gains for the students but more input will result in the gains that I want my students to have.

            One thing that I love about fluency writes is seeing what they can do compared to my old traditionally taught students. Also for part of the review this year we read back over the 5 or 6 fluency writes and the students were blown away by what they had learned. They even laughed at mistakes that they now could catch. Another thing was that sometimes they don’t feel like they are learning. I think this is why 4%er’s don’t like it. With this timeline of writing they were even impressed. But ultimately I don’t think the writing helped acquisition.

          5. You are right. At Abraham Lincoln High School, about four years ago, the “schoolwide focus” (a term that means next to nothing) for that year was on writing.

            So the Lincoln WL team, especially Annick Chen, who was teaching some French then as well as Chinese, had the kids write much more than usual. The result was noticeably lower writing scores. We had proof that focusing on form too early, and focusing on the output skills before those thousands of hours of input have been provided, is a mistake.

            What you describe, Melissa, is the way we want it to happen with writing. And yes, the 4%ers don’t get to dictate the process. To me, that is such a wonderful thing. It means that we are no longer just talking about a level playing field, we are creating one.

            Congratulations on your year!

      3. Thanks for this clarification, Eric. Somehow I forgot the whole entire point of dictations: focusing the kids’ brains on form -how letters combine together to symbolize the sounds which are already deeply rooted in their (unconscious) mental system. That would explain why it’s “lower quality” input!

        Also, Eric, I’m afraid I’m still feeling dense on the benefits of Fluencywrites. I definitely understand what you mention above about Fluencywrites increasing student confidence -that is the only benefit I was aware of, aside from the benefits I get seeing what my students are able to communicate fluently in writing. But as far as “skill at accessing what they’ve already got in their unconscious mental representation,” could you clarify what exactly you mean by “skill” in this case? I really want to understand this so I can use FLuencywrites more intelligently (beyond the already nice benefits of boosting student confidence, showing me what my students can do at a given point). Are you providing overt instruction to your students in writing skills (sentence/paragraph-level organization, circumlocution in cases where they don’t have the words they want, adjective/adverb use, etc.)? Or by “skills in accessing” their acquired language do you mean that the very act of doing Fluencywrites makes them able to access what they know more efficiently, or….something else???

        For anyone that uses Fluencywrites/Quickwrites (And why not even Slowwrites? 🙂 ), what benefit(s) language-wise do you find therein?

        I don’t get it, but I’d like to. It’ll make me feel a little more like a real teacher, since I’m sure not doing any planning right now, except for perusing wordreference.com before class for phrases I don’t know in French that the students decide we need in our stories.

        P.S. It’s so true that the real work in this kind of teaching happens in class, “in the moment” as we interact with our kids. I’m “working” very hard right now, but in a very easy-feeling way, if that makes any sense, and nobody -not a single student!!!- is escaping my attention with chatting or sleeping or robotfaces or fake oui’s or non’s when they didn’t really understand the question I just asked or doing work for other classes (I have all honors and AP classes right now). If they are escaping me focusing all the CI on them, right away, it must be because they are really good at faking being engaged. I’m having the most focused and fun classes I’ve ever had. And all with a smile, merci M. Slavic.

        1. Well, if reading this blog is considered planning, then I’m planning like there’s no tomorrow. Definitely intrigued by this new masters-credit option announced here there other day! But I still don’t know how to write a lesson plan. If I did HAVE to submit a lesson plan, it would probably be a picture, or maybe at most a three-bullet list of structures, or maybe a blank page. Yes, it would be a blank page -wouldn’t that be the most accurate lesson plan for any given story day 🙂 ?

          1. Melissa Sadler

            We have to put lesson plans in the computer for the next week. This semester I changed how I did things. I wrote my goals and structures and then a list of activities I planned on doing. PQA, storyasking, reading, dictation, etc… As the week went by I put what we actually did each day. This left me a lot of freedom to change my instruction and pleased my administrators. I also had my notes pages that I copied from a student. The lesson plans are really repetitive since we follow the 3 part model but it worked.

          2. Greg, I consider this blog my main planning medium. Every day that I read it, I know much better how I’m going to reach my students with the high-frequency language that we already know and that we can’t help but use if we aren’t focusing on artificial thematic lists and sequential grammar curriculums.

            A veteran science teacher friend of mine who teaches at a different school that me (who also is part of an online PLC, directed by a yogi teacher such as Ben, which she credits as saving her career), responded to a younger teacher at her school who was incredulous that she doesn’t “plan” her lessons out on paper each day, “I don’t plan, I react”. Of course she plans, in her own experienced way, but she recognizes the limits of planned out lessons and the need for good teachers to be flexible and react to the environments/moods/interests/goings-on around them. That’s what’s nice about story scripts and jokes (a la Bryce Hedstrom) and songs and pictures… we can just pick them up in the moment (a week or a day or an hour or 5 minutes beforehand) and, if we have the requisite skills of slow and teach-to-the-eyes and such, WE can use THEM to reach our students as we see best fit. The re-imagination of the craft of FL teaching… I love it.

      4. Eric, how would you implement a “Quickread” with a classroom of kids? This Quickread sounds exactly like what teachers do with little kids learning how to read… documenting how many words they read in a minute with accurate pronunciation. The thing is that usually a Reading Specialist would pull the 1st grader from the classroom to do this. How could we do it in our classrooms? Have the rest of the class work on some SSR?

        1. Here is where I’ve gotten my ideas on mental representation and skill (VanPatten):
          revistas.um.es/ijes/article/viewFile/113951/107941

          Read these on fluency (Nation):
          http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/1997-Fluency-KIFL.pdf

          http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/1991-Fluency-MELTA.pdf

          And this from Nation is all about Quickreads (Speed Reading):
          http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/Speed-reading-whole.pdf

          The first 6 pages are about speed reading and the rest are English texts to use during that time.

          1. On the 4/3/2 activity would you give the student a topic and immediately start the timer or would they read or would they prepare a talk? This would be done at what level?

          2. I like the idea of the activity Controlling the teacher. It fits in with the rule Stop me when you don’t understand. But is this in line with going slow? It seems like speed storytelling.

          3. Thanks for the links, Eric. VanPatten’s distinction between mental representation and skill is very helpful.

            For those who have not followed the link, he explains that mental representation is unconscious part where language/grammar is formed. The one thing we can do as teachers is manipulate or structure the input.

            Grammar is not a skill. It is an unconscious result of the inner workings of the brain with comprehensible input.

            Skill is “the interaction of speed and accuracy.” His list of skills follows the three modes: “In the case of language, skill refers to communication in all of its manifestations: interpretation (reading, listening), expression (writing, speaking), and negotiation (conversational interaction, turn taking).”

            Skills develop by engaging in “the very behaviors that people would like to develop.” That is to develop reading we read. To develop listening we listen. He allows that writing develops through writing and reading. By develop he means that the skills increase in speed and or accuracy. So fluency is skill development, of which the speedwrites and speedtalks discussed in this post are measures.

            Is dictation a valid skill to develop? I would suggest that it is, even apart from its disciplinary function (Ben above) or evidence that we are serious teachers. E.g., taking phone messages, transcribing lyrics, dictation as notes, etc. It develops spelling accuracy, punctuation, sound/symbol correlations in a meaningful way. One of the results is that we have credibility with our colleagues and more traditional minded students.

            But VanPatten is emphatic that skill development is development of whatever language is already present through communicative input. So (structured) CI is the priority.

            But the fact that the skills to be developed are the very activities that create input is a felicitous situation. The advantage of TPRS is that it puts a priority on activities so that we begin with the negotiation skills/interpersonal mode and move to reading for more input and encourage speaking/writing where we can. If we need a change up like dictation/mini-dictation we are still more on target that filling in the blanks.

          4. Nathaniel, you just gave us the SparkNotes version of the academic article Eric linked to us. How cool is that! Thanks for letting us be a little lazy and get those graduate credits a little easier 🙂

          5. Nathaniel, you said “He [Van Patten] allows that writing develops through writing and reading.”

            I just noticed this during a re-reading of The Power of Reading by Krashen: “Numerous studies show that increasing writing quantity does not affect writing quality”.

            I do not, at the moment, have the time to dive deeper into the potential contradictions here, but thought I’d throw it out quickly to all you rock stars as I’m on the run.

          6. Glad you pick up on that Jim. Reading pages 8-12, I think that writing is the one skill in which VanPatten backs off from his assertion that doing X produces skill in X:

            “What is not clear from the research, however, is to what extent this feedback actually impacts development (Williams, 2005). As alluded to earlier, there is a relationship between reading and writing in the L1 and it is not clear to what extent skilled adult writers are skilled writers because they received feedback on their writing or because they’ve read so much along the way. (It’s worth pointing out that even skilled writers get their work copyedited.)”

            He also distinguishes the L1 learner (who enters school for reading/writing and already has a mental representation of L1) from the L2 learner (who enters school without the mental representation of L2). As L2 teachers we are helping learners to create the mental representation and develop the skills. In traditional teaching we try to teach grammar/vocab lists from which it is expected that students will eventually have all of the puzzle pieces to do the skills, if they work hard enough. In communicative teaching we try to teach them the skills without the mental representation being in place. In CI we try to create an interactive atmosphere in which comprehended language interacts with the brain to create the mental representation as we try to nurture them through each skill.

            Krashen and VanPatten have pointed to a real pedagogical malpractice. Traditional and communicative approaches have tried to get the cart before the horse. We ask for writing without having provided reading . We ask for speaking without having provided listening. We ask for linguistic maturity without having nurtured. We ask for skills in the language without having language.

            I do not think that Krashen and VanPatten are at odds. 1. Both are saying that the skill for writing emerges from having the language with which to write. 2. How that skill is further developed (made faster and more accurate) may be another question. The first point pertains to my students. I think the second question pertains to people more advanced than my students.

            Hope I am making sense.

          7. “How that skill is further developed (made faster and more accurate) may be another question. The first point pertains to my students. I think the second question pertains to people more advanced than my students.”

            Same here, with the exception of my level 3 students and a few at level 2… they haven’t had enough CI for the writing to really affect their abilities, IMO. And for the majority of my students, it can be an affective filter upper, unless enough CI has been attained or they are low-anxiety risk-takers.

            I do like using output (more oral than written), in a limited way, as a method to improve the skill of circumlocation. I told kids the other day that circumlocation may be the most important skill they learn in my course, in order to be able to communicate more and more messages as they develop their fluency with a limited lexicon.

          8. Nathaniel, I really like your explanation (once again)!
            I also really like VanPatten’s conceptualization of mental representation + skill. Feels intuitively right 🙂

          9. Great summary Nathaniel! For those interested in reading more, I had included quotes I liked from this article over on the forum. Scroll down to comment #8.

            https://benslavic.com/blog/forum/general-discussion-1/discussion-of-sla-research-beyond-krashen-history-theories-and-applications/

            I recently wrote a little on the forum about fluency activities and the 4/3/2 oral fluency activity, which I have not tried, but sounds like a good one:

            https://benslavic.com/blog/forum/general-discussion-1/fluency-activities/

      5. I am going to have to disagree that a dictation does not provide high-quality input. The kids are hearing various reps and must focus on the message to produce the form. They are hearing, processing, writing, reading what they wrote (rereading), reading what the teacher writes, editing, focusing on form, and then demonstrating comprehension (through drawing, perhaps). I think that it is a highly-complex learning tool, especially when scaffolded with tons of repetitions, point and pause, and story reading. I consider the dictation the sort of summative assessment of a “unit” (story).

        1. Or are they focusing on the form to get the form?

          Take the following dictation examples. The teacher reads:
          “Store go dinosaur school be good.”

          Can you correctly complete the dictation? No message has been conveyed here.

          When you can substitute nonsense words then you know you have a mechanical, non-meaning based drill.
          E.g. teacher reads: “I blonk to breep the bung.”

          Now, especially with longer sentences, in which you are reading only a phrase of the sentence at a time, there is likely to be even less focus on the meaning of the entire sentence and more on the form of the individual parts.

          At least, this is my thinking right now.

          And when we say that dictation improves spelling that sounds pretty non-Krashen-like. Krashen would argue spelling gets better with more CI and focusing on the message, not the individual letters and not by writing.

          1. I understand your argument about nonsense words, but doesn’t that apply to an activity such as
            Turn the following sentences into the past tense
            1. I blap before I go to work.
            2. She vlonks while at the store.

            Krashen says that through reading we develop spelling habits–essentially through CI. And yes, Krashen says that input develops language, not output.

            I have to say, Eric. You’re challenging my thoughts on the dictation. Essentially one could do the dictation without understanding what he is writing. On the whole I do think (but I don’t know if I can prove it) that the students understand what they’re producing. I see their little heads scanning classroom posters to make sure that they have produced the right form.

            Don’t you think they are using their monitor in the process?

            I need to think.

          2. When I do dictation I try to throw something funny in. If they laugh I at least have an idea that they understand. I think that you could put a meaning part into dictation. I think some do not get meaning until they are finished writing but I think most do understand because I try to stay in bounds. With all that I have to admit I only did dictations probably 4 times this year but I hope to do mini-dictations more often next year as a change of pace when things get dull. Do y’all stay in bounds during dictation or do y’all use new words?

          3. May I be a Sinophile for a moment? This probably won’t apply to alphabet-based languages, but it touches on the meaning/form issue.

            There are two kinds of Chinese hand-written dictation possible: pinyin, which is how the sounds are spelled in letters — that could be devoid of attachment to meaning and still be “correct” if someone has mastered what letter represents what sound. It’s totally phonetic once you know it. The other kind is character writing, which is more likely to reveal which meaning a student thinks is indicated. Chinese is so very contextually-based. There are a lot of homophones (even considering the tones), so the context is very important. Context helps a Westerner figure out more than the sound of the tone sometimes does (it takes time for the brain to notice tones really reliably). So, I think in character dictation at least, the meaning must come across for them to get it. I think that is what I’ve observed in my own students. They don’t know what to write until they understand it (and then sometimes they still don’t know what to write, but that’s a character memory issue and that takes more time).

            Really what I like best is a typed Chinese dictation, which combines both. You have to know how to spell in pinyin to call up the correct characters, and then you need to recognize the character(s) for the meaning you want. So typing in Chinese is both spelling and meaning-related. Thank you for entertaining this diversion. I so love Chinese, more as I know it better through teaching it for a while now.

          4. Diane, the character writing sounds more like translation mixed with dictation, while the pinyin is more like dictation. Does this sound accurate?

            A good way for us to know reliably if dictations do indeed provide high-quality CI (albeit less of it), is to have them translate what they’ve dictated (though thereby further lessening the CI potential). Melissa’s idea of throwing in some humor to gauge reactions is good too, but limited to the structures that are contained in the humor (or grossness, or sadness, or whatever other emotion we might be able to notice).

            I personally do very few whole-group dictations. I used to do more. I did not see the value in them enough to keep doing them. I do though get them in via having a student dictate something on the board for me (I do this a lot, partially out of laziness, partially out of a brain-break/change-it-up motive). Drew’s idea of using short dictations as a note-taking strategy is pretty cool. I might try it with my level 2 kids (level one does not need notebook/folder in my classes) next year.

            Eric, I printed off that report by Nation about using dictations as assessment tools (or something like that), but haven’t read it yet. What do we learn from his/her report about the utility of dictations in FL instruction?

          5. Hmm, no I think both are dictation, but one focuses on sound (the pinyin version) and one more directly on meaning (the character version). They hear the same sounds in either case.

            I use them rarely myself, and mostly when I feel a need for refocusing scattered minds of children. I use them as a comprehension check-type activity, usually at the end of class. I think with older students I would use them only that way.

          6. Ok, right, they’re both dictation. As someone with very little experience in Chinese, I was imagining that having to come up with the character in order to take the dictation, specifically as someone of a native language that uses the latin alphabet, would require a second step, namely taking the sounds (I’m imagining pinyin when I hear the sounds like “yao” and “wo”) and translating those into the character. But perhaps your students are acquiring the characters in the same fashion that we acquire reading skills with the latin alphabet? If so, that’s real cool. Do you put both up at the same time when translating something on the board? When I took Linda Li’s 16 hr Mandarin class several summers ago, we only got the pinyin, but that was ok, not enough time to make sense of characters anyways.

          7. I am totally new to this and obviously reading (an thoroughly enjoying) entries from this past Spring. Last year I did dictations and then asked students to translate the meaning. I wanted to know they knew what they were writing and this was proof. I did find that most of them translated accurately. I was happy to know when a student did not because I could then work on it a bit more in class.

        2. Drew I used to use that argument in favor of dictation with Susie Gross when she told me not to do so much of it. It’s a good one and what you say about it is true. I think the reason I backed off on it was because Susie told me to and because after a few years I could see that it was just too time consuming.

  5. “I have been feeling the results of students inability to listen and focus. They have been so trained to do school that they don’t know how to deal in this unconscious process nor do they even believe it can exist.”
    Jeff and everyone, you are getting at something that has been nagging at me for a long while. Pushing CI to the point where you look out and see screen savers, is not keeping them with us. Isn’t this just another way of describing differentiation? Something for everyone? For some who get the concept, they are thrilled with school not looking like school as we all know it, but others are just uncomfortable without the paper and pencil. Some just don’t take it seriously unless they feel a little rigor – as they describe rigor! I have said this before, some kids just embrace “difficult” and wear it like a cloak of honor. It is some bizarre way of telegraphing to others that they are smart since x class is just impossible and the work is so hard. I loath it, but live with it. My enrollment is fine and stable, but some of my gifted level 3 students have chosen not to do level 4. I need to figure that out over the summer. Love this thread.

    1. Tina Hargaden

      I was thinking what about offering the chance to do “rigorous” work (however they describe it) on their own time and then being recognized for their extra effort in some special way in class? I would have really jumped on that opportunity as a MS and HS language student. Of course, I was a real nerd. But the kids you are describing seem a little nerdy. Or just in need of strokes to that part of their ego that is the “smart kid” persona. For me, that persona was pretty much my whole shtick. Having a teacher to help you develop a different in-class persona is a real gift. If only I had had a Latin or French teacher who had helped me to be the hilarious smarty-pants I grew into later on…how much that would have helped me develop as a person.

    2. I am planning a full switch this year to TPRS. I am thinking about this very problem and planning on addressing it right at the very beginning with information and a discussion about what it means to “acquire” a language, what learning will look like in my classroom, by questioning what “rigor” might mean to them, and by asking them whether listening and “paying attention” in class will be easy or hard.. These are just my first thoughts but I know my students will benefit from this type of questioning before entering into a new way of teaching. Eric Hermann has some great info on his website and prepares his kids in a very nice way, making it easy for them to think of themselves as successful from the very beginning. I will try to emulate this!

      1. Thanks for the shout out Lisa!

        I get to fly under the radar in a low-stakes teaching position as I am 1-man FL department with a supportive administration and no pressure of any state tests. Probably ironic to the accountability pushers, those conditions allow me the freedom to do what is best for my students.

        Lisa, on the other hand, has quite a different situation and for that reason, she needs all the support we can give her. She is taking on some of the most stereotypical grammarians and authoritarians out there. She is required to teach and test on a traditional grammatical and thematic syllabus and she is mandated to follow their grading breakdown, which includes way too much assessment, especially of output and grammar. What’s worse: those in the dept. are very convinced their way is the truth and they interpret any conversation about research or methods as an attack to be silenced. Can you see me being quiet? ha.

        Lisa will be the first to bring TCI to our local high school! In a way, the fate of hundreds of students depends on her. Her success will bring about a sooner transition to what I believe is inevitably going to be the way of the future.

        1. I have been asked to serve on a consult to overhaul the benchmark tests in my district. In preparation for that I got a book on language assessment (Language Assessment; Principles and Classroom Practices by H Douglas Brown and Priyanvada Abeywickrama from San Francisco State University) and am working through it. [Odds are high that I am the only member of the consult – including the district administrator – who is doing any sort of preparation for this.] Even though I have not even finished chapter 1, I have found some good information. When I have finished the book, perhaps I’ll write up a report.

          I did peek ahead to chapter two and encountered the following. The major principles of language assessment require that an assessment or test must have

          -practicality
          –stays within budget
          –can be completed within time constraints
          –has clear directions for administration
          –appropriately utilizes available human resources
          –does not exceed available material resources
          –considers time and effort involved in both design and scoring

          [N.B.: On this criterion alone the current regimen of standardized testing fails miserably.]

          -reliability
          –is consistent in administration
          –gives clear directions for scoring/evaluation
          –has uniform rubrics for scoring/evaluation
          –lends itself to consistent application of rubrics
          –contains items/tasks that are unambiguous to the test-taker

          [Once again, standardized testing fail]

          -validity
          –measures exactly what it proposes to measure
          –does not measure irrelevant variables
          –relies as much as possible on empirical evidence (performance)
          –involves performance that samples the test’s objective
          –offers useful, meaningful information about a test-taker’s ability
          –is supported by a theoretical rationale or argument

          [Need I say more?]

          -authenticity
          –contains language that is as natural as possible
          –has items that are contextualized rather than isolated
          –includes meaningful, relevant, interesting topics
          –provides some thematic organization to items, such as through a story line or episode
          –offers tasks that replicate real-world tasks

          [This is where I am going to have fun on the benchmarks consult. How does a test on discrete-item grammar fulfill any of the criteria for authenticity?]

          -washback (different from consequential validity; refers to extent to which assessment affects a student’s future language development, i.e. promotion or inhibition of learning)
          –positively influences what and how teachers teach
          –positively influences what and how learners learn
          –offers learners a chance to adequately prepare
          –gives learners feedback that enhances their language development
          –is more formative than summative in nature
          –provides conditions for peak performance by the learner

          So, now the question is: How many legacy programs have assessments that meet or even approach these criteria? In my situation, at least, I think the greatest incentive for teachers to change will come through revised assessments because most legacy teachers teach to the test, so if we change the nature of the test, they will have to change in order to look like they are effective teachers. For too long they have simply used assessments that tested what they taught rather than what they ought to have been teaching. Consequently, I will be pushing very hard in this consult for benchmarks that relate to real-world language tasks [Just remembered: CA State Standards require this], and I would most like to get a single end-of-year exam like DPS, but I doubt I’ll achieve it. Perhaps we can get it down to one test per semester.

          1. The red flag I see, Robert, is that this is going to be too much for your committee to absorb. Will they be able to even respond to or even understand how legacy programs and standardized testing fail? This may be a challenge for you but if anyone can take it on you are the one. I would add that I love the term legacy programs. Can you comment on where that came from and what exactly what it is meant to convey? I think I heard it in Chicago once.

            One other point, re: cost of the testing. In DPS (one of eight major metro districts to be awarded Gates (many millions of) dollars, over the past five years or so we have been awash in money, and Diana was available to transfer it into our current CI based exams. But it has taken many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars and so may be impractical for other districts during this time of strong budget cuts, esp. as we are everybody’s red-headed step sister.

            So I am very interested in what comes from this. As usual, there you are again in the position of educating people who may even want it or know that there is something in their thinking that, on behalf of what is best for children, needs to change.

            The beauty of it is that you have those California Standards. Those with whom you will start this work will certainly find them pesky. (I just wanted to say pesky). They’ll probably find YOU pesky. What you say here is strong:

            …I will be pushing very hard in this consult for benchmarks that relate to real-world language tasks….

          2. “I think the greatest incentive for teachers to change will come through revised assessments because most legacy teachers teach to the test, so if we change the nature of the test, they will have to change in order to look like they are effective teachers.”

            BINGO! That’s what I’ve been saying! I want to create a practical, reliable, valid test of proficiency. Then, I challenge any teacher to use that test in addition (ideally in lieu) to their final semester exam. If you are required by your department to test their curriculum and to stick to their traditional format, then so be it. But also evaluate their proficiency. When your kids score well (improve) on the proficiency test, and improve equally and probably improve more comparative to students from the traditional program, then that should open the dialogue. At the least, it defends your approach and will take off some of the pressure. I think more teachers would try out the TCI waters if they had a more CI-friendly assessment. The best existing test options are usually impractical because of cost and training and they tend to favor the traditional thematic categories (cough – ACTFL – cough).

            I’ve spent the past month with daily email correspondence with Dr. Mason about test development. I am deeply indebted to her and she said Krashen gave her support when she was starting her teacher-researcher career so she is paying it forward. I will be happy to do the same for all interested.

            I also freely downloaded from en.bookfi.org and read the book Testing in Language Programs (1996) by James Dean Brown. One of the most important points in the book is the importance of distinguishing between a norm-referenced test (proficiency) and a criterion-referenced test (achievement). The test content and statistics used to analyze are different depending on the type of test, which depends on the purpose of the evaluation.

            I have piloted 1 test, but the results can’t be trusted since so many kids copied. It at least gave me input on what was working and I revised the test and actually tomorrow I am administering another test pilot. The same group of kids gets the same test with a week of time between in order to evaluate test-retest reliability and to do an items analysis.

            I love my test format right now:

            1. 100 blank cloze test of 2 stories written at 1st grade readability and with high-frequency language (stories come from the Foundations Reading Library graded reader series). 60 minutes.

            *Cloze tests, while they don’t appear to be real-life tasks, are actually assessing reading comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar, and a little output, all at once! That means, we get a measure that will correlate well with general FL proficiency.

            2. Writing – students read (or can hear) a story in L2, then they hand in the reading, and they rewrite that same story in L2. 10 minutes to read, 20 minutes to write.

            3. Listening – students hear a story once while they take notes if desired and then they rewrite the story, summarizing as much as they can. 5 minutes to listen, 20 minutes to write.

            For #2 & 3 I am going to use the same inter-rater, holistic scoring procedure that Dr. Mason and Krashen have used in their studies. 2-3 raters are to score pretests and posttests together and they can’t see the student’s name. First, stories are put into 3 categories: Good, Ok, Bad. Then, each category is divided in 2, those better and those worse of each category. The result is 6 categories. This is to score a norm-referenced test.

            To assess accuracy (which I won’t be doing), you could do an analysis of error free phrases (clauses). See work of Sandra Ishikawa.

            4. If I find the time, I may also design a vocabulary test.

            a) Enter all reading texts from level 1 (this is from my FVR program).
            b) Run a frequency analysis to see which words are most repeated throughout all the texts.
            c) Choose the highest occurring words from a few different vocabulary levels, up to the 1,000-2,000 word level.

            I am piloting the tests in Honduras for an FVR EFL program, but I plan to do similar pilot testing in the US starting in September. I will be happy to share with all of you the final draft (or any draft) of the tests. Once reliability and validity has been supported, the results of the tests in our TCI classrooms will support claims that our programs are effective and can also be used by those of us who want to investigate our own research questions in our classrooms.

            – – – – – –
            Ben – I think Terry Waltz first introduced the term “legacy method” on the moreTPRS list.

          3. Forgot to add: the test format I’ve decided on should have a tremendous POSITIVE backwash effect. Success on each section depends on comprehension – reading or listening. So, what will students do to improve their score? . . . Exactly 🙂

          4. Dear Eric,

            I am very impressed with what you’re doing! The reading and the crafting are a huge gift to the profession.

            Some of the descriptions raise questions in my mind though. Are you going for holistic assessments or trying to assess strengths in different areas? I ask because of my experience with special ed kids who can demonstrate speaking ability that is far above their ability to write and often to read. Sometimes it seems to be above their ability to process listening as well, in which case I realize I have to slow down, even for assessment.

            Thus, cloze tests, which I also love, test not only reading but the ability to recall vocabulary on the spot.

            #2 and #3 test students’ short-term memory as well as writing, not just reading/listening.

            Even just being stressed with a test (though I’m sure yours aren’t!) might keep kids from remembering well.

            Is it worth considering doing questions in English on a reading/listening, and prompting with a picture or picture series for writing?

            (Sorry if you’ve discussed this elsewhere and I’ve just lost the thread.)

          5. You bring up good points. And these were all concerns, plus many more, that Dr. Mason had to relieve me of. The procedures I am using are based on those Dr. Mason has used in her experiments.

            The point of the tests is to compare students to other students and to themselves before and after a FL course. All that has to be shown is improvement, not perfect grades, in fact, a 50% on the cloze tests would be an excellent average on the post-tests! If the kid is special ed, well, then they just need to improve. And regardless of special ed or not, we want to see them develop listening and the other skills.

            For #3 (listening), they can take notes, so less short-term memory use. For #3, I think short-term memory use is also minimized, because they are given 10 minutes for a 658 word story. Plenty of time to read it at least twice and they should have plenty to write about. The level of the students is such that they can’t write much anyways, so memory isn’t the problem.

            In my first pilot I gave the reading in L1 and gave them picture strips while they wrote. And this procedure is used in SLA research. But I’m not sure it’s used with beginners. What happens is the kids may understand in L1, but then they’re translating and searching for words. It slows down their ability to write. It becomes more like an interpreter’s job and less “natural” – reading in L2 and then writing in L2 is a more “integrated” test and would encourage more reading in the L2 in preparation (+ backwash!). The result of the first pilot was that the kids barely wrote anything. So in my 2nd pilot I am trying Mason’s advice. My 2nd pilot test subjects are older and the pretest reveals that they can barely write, even with this procedure. More was written than the 1st pilot, but that could be the age difference. I’m not surprised they can’t write much, since the instruction they’ve received has been brutally traditional and poverty is pervasive, which causes many different challenges to education.

            And I’m looking more holistically. I want to see that proficiency has improved. I could have settled for just 1 type of test, but with reading, listening, and writing (even if they assess more than just those skills – “cloze tests . . . assessing reading comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar, and a little output” – yes, I quoted myself, how Krashenesque! haha), I get a better sense for overall proficiency. I’m not assessing speaking, because it’s impractical and a challenge to maintain reliability to administer and score.

            These are fixed-rate deletion cloze tests. In general, every 10th word is deleted, with a 30-word intro and conclusion. The reading texts are not TPRS materials, nor written by me (although I did modify and lengthen them a bit), but are from levels 1 and 2 of a graded reader (75 headword and 100 headword counts respectively).

            Of course, there is a degree of stress in a test, and there always will be. We do what we can to lower that. We just have to accept that.

            I prefer kids writing summaries (in L1 for listening), rather than comprehension questions. Both ways could work. I think the summary captures overall comprehension better, giving them more freedom to demonstrate all they’ve comprehended.

            The texts from the cloze, reading, an writing sections are written at the level I expect the faster processors, more motivated students (those that read more at home) to comprehend well. The Flesch Reading Ease score is over 90 for each text and between Kindergarten and 2nd grade Flesch-Kincaid grade level. Once I do an analysis of the average frequency of the vocabulary, it’ll reveal that the content is VERY high-frequency language, which further supports validity.

            One of the things I like most about these test formats is the practicality and ease of test development, administration, and scoring!

            I discussed a little of this on the forum, but not much.

            Keep questioning. I’m learning how to do all of this now. Sometimes I disagree with myself 🙂

          6. Thanks so much for explaining!

            I would love to be able to see what you do and mimic it in Russian, if you’re willing to share later. Knowing that you’ve done the research is very important. We could maybe even use it at a bunch of levels with immersion students as well as regular.

          7. That’s the idea! To share it! I recently made a similar announcement to the moreTPRS listserv. You can translate and modify to your language and level. At least it gives you an example of a simple, practical test format. It would still be best to pilot the test with your specific student population, but if unable, then this would still be an improvement on the testing situation in many schools. This is only 1 test format. There’s likely dozens more good formats. But I do think it’s very CI-friendly.

          8. Yes, I got the term “legacy method” from Terry Waltz.

            Yes, I’m sure I will be “pesky” as far as the others are concerned, but I will have done the research and they won’t.

            Since the district has indicated that they would like to develop common benchmarks across languages, I have some very strong arguments for getting rid of discrete-point grammar questions. Ser/estar? The distinction doesn’t exist in German. Preterite/Imperfect? The distinction is irrelevant in German. Irregular verbs? There are only two in German: to be and to have. (The “irregulars” are called “strong verbs” in German, but I don’t know that I will volunteer that information.) Subjunctive with verbs of wish, etc.? Not German. That means that the benchmarks need to test communicative proficiency/competence.

            I will also be arguing for reading comprehension questions in English. Just yesterday I looked at one of the Spanish 2 benchmarks, and the questions were in Spanish. In the reading, the author (it’s an e-mail/letter to a friend) wants to “ir a la playa”. Among the answers is the choice “las orillas del mar”. My question: if a student missed that question was it because they didn’t understand “beach”, which was what the text had, or because they didn’t understand “the banks of the sea” in the answer? There was contamination here, so the question was invalid. Needless to say, Diana is my hero.

    1. Carol, will you let us know if you come to any conclusions in your own mind about all this? I look forward to hearing your thoughts after more discussion with the topic.

    2. Chill,
      When I give my class survey at the end of the semester, overwhelmingly the one thing that they perceive (and we know to be) to be the most effective is story telling. How to keep it fresh, is the problem I think we all face. In levels 2+ I tend to do a rotation of a story every three weeks with a schedule like
      Week A: story asking
      Week B: chapter of a novel
      Week C: song/movie talk/episode of Extr@

      By the end of week B they are begging to tell a story.

  6. Jim, once I get through exams – I am done Wednesday – I will have a chance to really re-read this thread and the more list conversation. I hope to see many of you this summer and would love to hash this out.

    1. Will you be in Chicago, Denver, or both?

      I’m taking the short trip this year, 5 hours to Chicago vs 14 to Denver.

      Who else is going to NTPRS? Ben, maybe you could start a thread so that those of us going there could organize a Chi-town gathering, perhaps some War Room-esque operations? Oh wait, I could do that on the forum. I keep forgetting about the forum…

      1. I live in Chicago but I have a summer program to teach. We’ll see if I can take off a day or two to attend the conference. Nonetheless, I know Bradley from NYC and Jason from Scotland are going to the NTPRS conference because they’ll be crashing at my home!

        I would really like to meet up with everyone too. War Room-esque… hmmm. You know, Carla in Winnetka schools (as I mentioned in the Chicagoland TPRS/ TCI meeting thread) put together this list of reading activities that have worked well for her as a strong CI teacher. She presented this list to us and demo-d a couple of them. This was extremely beneficial for all of us in attendance. Maybe, if we meet in a War Room-esque setting, we could put a bullet point list together of something we’ve experimented with, like PQA activities or MovieTalk activities or Brain Breaks or whatever (I know I’ve fine-tuned my Reading Option A) and present our list to the group.

        How does that sound?

        I’ll even throw out the idea of meeting at my home (I live real close to downtown Chicago). I could softly persuade my wife to fry us some chicken or barbeque some ribs… people fall out over her cooking 🙂

  7. Sean and Jim the Forum gets less traffic. Let’s immediately publish a War Room article for NTPRS Chicago. Let’s do exactly the same thing we are doing for iFLT Denver. Carol gave me three 1.5 hour sessions and we have 12 slots of 15 filled along with trying to grab time in the evenings (too precious to waste) and maybe you guys could do the same.

    Sabrina will be there and we coach the same way. So I will contact Lisa and see what happens. If she approves of some War Room sessions, or even if she doesn’t, what y’all in the Chicago group have to do is arrange things, making sure that War Room people can get to the other workshops as well as spend time in the War Room with everybody – that core War Room group of 15 in Chicago – there at each session since trust and safety are the main signature features of War Rooms.

    With this format, we all know exactly what we are trying to learn, the doors are closed. We can develop trust and feel safe. When we can take chances when we are working in front of the group that we can’t take elsewhere. We do that in our classrooms and our kids learn more, so why shouldn’t it apply to us? We can get more learnin’ on.

    1. You know, the irony of the fact that I live near Chicago and am moving to Denver in a summer when a conference is in each of those very cities is really striking! I am almost sure to be moving one of those weeks and can’t go to either as a result. We still don’t have a house – may not until late June when we’ll probably visit and aim to secure a lease on a rented house.

  8. I’m finding this thread late and, having read it through, don’t have the energy to find the comment I wish to answer! It was something about having other ways to get more CI but give the teacher a little time off.

    If you’ve been to Betsy’s presentations, you know about “Blind reading,” or something like that. When kids know a story well, and they’ve read the text of it, they sit in pairs. One is looking at the projection and the other has her back to it. The one looking has to gesture to the other in such a way that the second student can tell the story. Once they get through a paragraph, they switch. It’s wonderful because students think the person talking is the one working. Really, it’s the kid who is reading who gets the most input and has to figure out how to transmit it. I’ve had kids jumping up to move, and others who use our “grammar” (past tense, instrumental case, etc) signs to remind their pairs to change endings. I’m sure in Betsy’s class it’s orderly, but in my class a pair who finishes goes to help a pair that hasn’t, adding to the hilarity, with three kids trying to gesture for one. It’s not work, the way they see it.

    1. I’ve done these also and it’s a great way to change up how we read. I’ve called it the back-to-the-screen retell. I’ve done it in pairs and also as a whole-class activity.

      One thing I also did, similar, is have students in partners stand with their back to the screen and I read the text aloud, while the partners have to gesture everything they can that I say (the class, but 2 students, can hear me and read the text – CI x 2).. After a few lines, I send up a new pair of students. I’ve also had superstar students read and I’ll be the person acting out with my back to the text. I have them play around with the speed of the retell, which makes me gesture in slow motion or in fast forward. Gesturing is REALLY big in my classroom.

  9. Back to writing: I saw a brief report on research that says something happens when kids write in longhand (rather than take notes on computer screens):
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/taking-notes-by-hand-benefits-recall-researchers-find/51411

    (Now that I know Terry Waltz, I always want to know more facts about the research and its subjects, time frames, goals and so on.)

    I wonder whether using cursive makes a difference, or whether it’s the experience of writing on the page that is critical.

    If I ask kids to use specific structures in a retell at least two weeks after we’ve been working them hard, their writing gives both them and me some clues about whether they’ve learned the structures, and at what level. I’ve been taken aback some times to find out that they still don’t know what the structures mean, and other times have found that the whole class could be creative with the structures. Maybe one way to have a brain break and a teacher time-out would be to ask kids to write a two-sentence skeleton story with the new structures every couple of days for a bit. I might try that with my upper-level kids, to help them process new information.

    As far as writing, I like the idea of handing out a sheet of paper for notes, but I am very bad at enforcing notebooks. I just don’t seem to make them important enough for kids to bring them every day. Instead, we use the comp notebooks, and those stay in the classroom unless students specifically request to take them home for a night or two. They have to be the same size, and they have to have the date every day so that I can tell if a student has been absent later.

    We take notes in them, quizzes, do fast-writes and story strips. I want to go back to occasional reflections (I learned well today because… I contributed to the learning process by… I want to improve by …). I have the kids glue in the question words and the super seven vocabulary words. We put stickers on the front for achieving certain tasks like participating in a retell or doing a particular job, and sometimes I put one on the front for students whose writing blows me away. Even high-schoolers love stickers.

  10. I just discovered Apple’s Dictation & Speech feature that comes with their OS (I have Yosemite but previous OSs also have it, I think). It’s pretty sweet! I plan on using it right away to do this kind of short dictée thing or do an immediate reading of a narrative or a story created in class. If you have a MacBook it should be found in your System Preferences –> Dictation & Speech.

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