The best way to practice PQA is to get a very simple text and read it to the kids. Circle out personalized questions from the book as things occur to you. It looks like a reading class, but you are really practicing your PQA for next year.
If the book says:
…Antoine Médina est responsable du transport de l’argent en Espagne….
then you can tell the class a secret that:
…our own Edwin in French class is responsible for the transport of gold to France….
and then circle it for all it’s worth.
That kind of personalization is based on the book and therefore if you get spooked by the PQA monster you can safely return, in a sweet bail out move, to reading to the kids from the book in English as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/03/21/read-the-novels-to-them-with-love/
You just go back and forth between the reading of the novel and the PQA.
One thing about doing this kind of novel based PQA is that the instructor can easily throw in a bit of very simple Reader’s Theatre into the process. If one is doing the short novel Pirates, for example, it is easy to split the room into the French and the Spanish, and assign students the roles of François and Antoine, etc. which gives a point of departure for the PQA. It is incredibly easy to do PQA with students when one can just look at the student Antoine in class and ask questions about different things as they arise during the course of reading the novel. It’s like the novel provides for a kind of instant personalization that allows the students to assume the role of an actor in the class, which they love.
In this kind of back and forth from the reading of the novel in English and the PQA that spins out of it, the teacher can easily ask questions like, “Antoine, do you have 478 bars of silver on your ship or 479 bars of silver?” and “Edwin, how many bars of gold are there on your ship?” Then, turning to the French side of the room, you can say, “François, do you want that silver?” etc.
