Hi Ben,
I received an e-mail from a colleague who is looking for ways to help her achieve and maintain the 90% target language goal. She has been turned off about TPRS, but does tell stories from personal experience to her students, so I tried to explain things without using any of the jargon. Here’s what I wrote.
Dear —-,
You already tell your students stories, so here are some ideas for telling them completely in Spanish and having the students understand them. -Write out an episode/story in Spanish at your students’ level of comprehension; keep it short, ideally half to three-quarters of a page. -Choose 3-4 structures from the story that students might need to work on a bit before they really get them; introduce those three to four structures as vocabulary -Play a game in which students try to guess what really happened in your story; create a “class story” this way by asking them questions and reinforcing the chosen structures. You can ask things like, “Where did I go?” “When did I go?” “Did I go to New Orleans?” “Did I go on a bus?” “Did I go on a train?” It can be humorous but certainly doesn’t have to get silly. -If you want to emphasize reading skills, you can even write the story on the board, an overhead, a tablet computer with projector, or a piece of paper under a document camera. Students get to see their collaborative effort take shape, and you are editing for correct grammar so that they see what is right from the very start. -After the class has created its version of the story, let them read what really happened. -Discuss the two stories. What did they get right? What was different? What would they have done? -As a comprehension check, you might give students a Flow Map and have them draw the story as homework, then re-tell it to a classmate the next day. As part of the homework you could have them copy (particularly in level 1) the Essential Sentences, then illustrate them. This allows students to demonstrate some higher-level thinking skills even with limited language ability. -This whole sequence can be done in Spanish with “just enough” (well below 10%) English to ensure comprehension and the ability to maintain Spanish. I often write necessary words on the board in two colors: black for the target language and green for English (but use whatever works for you).
Another idea would be to start telling your story and then stop at some point and ask students to predict what will happen next. For level 1 you can keep the questions simple, but you are simultaneously teaching students good skills (predicting, holding conclusions in abeyance) and allowing them to move up on Costa’s Levels of Inquiry / Bloom’s Taxonomy.
If you do this, you are going to bathe your students in real language that they enjoy and that is meaningful because they are creating it with your help. Then when you are ready to formally talk about how the language fits together, students will have manipulated the language and will have better results than being taught the rules first.
I know this flies in the face of what we normally do when using a textbook, but textbooks have some serious weaknesses. Among these are 1) textbook publishers put in far more information than is necessary because they expect teachers to choose what is important in their setting, not slavishly follow the book page by page (even though it often looks like that) and 2) the order of grammar discussions is determined, not by order acquisition, but more by order of ease of explanation. For example, when to use “ser” or “estar” is a late-acquired item – even native speakers will argue the issue – but textbooks regularly put it early in a level one book because it’s easy to explain.
