It is great to hear from Greg Stout. It wasn’t so long ago last spring when he was standing in a chaotic classroom in Charlotte staring out of his classroom window à la Grand Meaulnes knowing that soon he would never have to teach that class again. Now he is in France working at his craft with some older post bac French kids.
So this is a very lengthy answer to a series of questions Greg asked me in a comment here yesterday relative to work I am now doing on reading authentic texts. I put his entire comment with questions here first, and then my lengthy response below it, because I think it is important enough to make it into an article.
First, here is a link to the original article:
https://benslavic.com/blog/reading-authentic-texts-using-crd
This is Greg’s comment:
Thanks so much for sharing all about what’s happening with these kids in your class. I wish every kid in a language class could experience the success and happiness they must be feeling in your room. Is there any way you could video the Petit Prince portion of your class very soon? I would absolutely LOVE to see this in action to better feel the flow of how it works.
I have a few questions, which might be cleared up if you’re able/willing to share a video of this:
1) When you’re ready to move on to a new sentence do you read the new sentence at a normal pace and then go back and translate?
2) How does “translating” work when you’re doing this? Do you just translate the sentence slowly in English while your kids read the sentence in French? How do they follow along, knowing which word they should be reading in French to correspond to the one you’re saying in English?
3) In your original post you said that your steps are translate, then reps until you feel the students are comfy with the sentence, then you go nuts on circling. How does the reps portion of this cycle look different from the circling part?
I think I might try something like this with two groups of students I have here in France. I teach them in a high-school, but they’re students who already have their Bac and are doing a two-year program in management before university or work. I did CWB with them on our first day together, and it quickly spun into a strange mega-detailed “story” about a student in the class, except it wasn’t a story because it had no plot line. There was too much detail because they are sort of conversational in English, so I couldn’t circle one idea for too long. But, their English is far from fluent (whatever fluent means) when they try to output, mostly with out of place tenses and incorrect pronunciation, but with lots of vocab nonetheless. So, I’m thinking what you’re doing with Le Petit Prince might be my key with those two groups. Something that has an underlying theme beyond what’s possible with CWB or a story, but that would still allow me to circle with them and provide us with lots of compelling input. I just have to find something in English that would fulfill that task. What’s the English “equivalent” (forgive me) of Le Petit Prince?
Looking forward to following how this develops with your kids. Also looking forward to your answers to my questions about it, although I’m really just crossing my fingers that you’ll treat us to a video…
Here my response to Greg:
Greg I need to check releases and lug my video stuff over there so it may take a bit of time. Plus, if indeed I get some decent video showing this process I will need lots of time for editing in a translation track for those who don’t have French. I want you to see how big fast chunks of meaning are being understood with zero attention to the words. That is to say, now that I have my first group of kids with CI since the beginning now in level 3, I am finding that this Little Prince class is really about chunking sound even more that when those kids were sophomores. It’s really amazing and I never would have thought those kids could ever do that. It shows what a few years of intense CI can do and I should add that no test could be designed to measure what those kids can do. In my opinion. It’s an exciting time as many of us are working with upper level authentic CI kids for the first time and seeing some pretty funky stuff. But let’s not go there now.
I also wish I could have like three cameras, with two trained on the kids. They are the ones who give me the largely visual feedback through their eyes. Have you ever noticed how the word yes is in the word eyes? It’s like that what those kids do, they say yes and it is an honest and strong yes and it is all in their eyes. (We have had over two years to build trust so it is completely different than a beginning class.) It is so nice to be able to send a big chunk of sound over to them and see them catch it, almost athletically, in the invisible worlds of their minds, then process it correctly, and nod back with a yes in their eyes – a wonderful feeling of yes, they understand, now go on – so I know I can go on because they just gave me that permission.
Really, this is all new to me, the way this class processes. The kids are the ones who have made it to level 3, who have all along wanted to learn French for real, and they represent a smaller portion of kids than I think most of us here who have grown our own from level 1 to level 3 or 4 probably have. That is probably because of our school population, most of whom are ELL kids – I am just beginning to see how bad it is when they don’t have English and I don’t really have Spanish and so we lack a common linguistic ground. Plus, failure is built into some of their minds in ways we don’t see in white suburbia in Denver. It’s poverty again. There is an article here somewhere on that topic, which those of us who are teaching in a setting where poverty is grinding our students down can’t push away or separate from our instruction.
Your questions:
1) When you’re ready to move on to a new sentence do you read the new sentence at a normal pace and then go back and translate?
I don’t read it first I just start translating. Most of the time I write it on the board first and do a lot of the steps in Reading Option A (ROA) here:
www.benslavic.com/blog/reading-option-a-latest-update-2013
If you go study that ROA sequence, you will see that it is a very good way to read. I have never used it with novels, preferring R & D, always using it with Step 3 reading of stories. But it helps here. So I usually write each sentence from Le Petit Prince on the board and I use the asterisked steps from the above article – that is where the power is – with the sentence.
I am ready, when that sentence is on the board, to go so narrow and deep with it that I have no intention to do any thing else the whole class – just that sentence – until June if I need to.
Here are two examples of Reading Option A from a class I did three years ago at East High School:
2) How does “translating” work when you’re doing this? Do you just translate the sentence slowly in English while your kids read the sentence in French? How do they follow along, knowing which word they should be reading in French to correspond to the one you’re saying in English?
That’s why I write it down. If not, you only get the superstars to stay with you. This way, if you look at one of those Reading Option A videos, you can see that I like to put my hands on the words and look at them. When I look at all of them and I am not standing too far away (I allow no empty seats between me and any single kid). This is why I like my rolling backboard – it can be placed CLOSER to the kids. I can roll it right up to where I usually stand for a story. Often a Smart Board is too far away for this kind of intimate reading and close contact with them. Also, I get to have my artist drawing on the back of it when we create the story as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/videos/bubhakemeier-3/ (fast forward to 2:12 to see how we interpret what the artist drew while we were making the story)
So if you look at the Reading Option A videos above that answers your question I think. Let me know if not. I do have to add here that all of this works for me. It may not work for someone else and I am not saying that this is some kind of right way to do it. There is no right way in this work we are doing.
I do find it interesting how I used to do this ROA technique for stories we created in the TPRS format only but now am using it, mixing it with cRD, as I continue to experiment with the reading of authentic texts.
3) In your original post you said that your steps are to translate, then get reps until you feel the students are comfy with the sentence, then you go nuts on circling. How does the reps portion of this cycle look different from the circling part?
In the reps part I go from left to right getting reps on the particular words, reps that are accurate to the text (no PQA) with each one. So the first part is just a bunch of yes/no questions. I stretch it out like I have forever on that one sentence, and I of course I worship at the alter of SLOW while I do this. As each word or word chunk occurs on the sentence on the board I treat exactly like a target structure as if I were trying to establish meaning. So English is used here. Then, the circling part is the PQA, so no more English. So when I PQA the sentence it brings the questions up a level on the taxonomy. So the first part of this questioning technique is text-specific, and the second is just PQA.
And since each sentence is different, I have to figure out when to leave, which is always an intuitive thing where I have to feel when the interest fades or when I start to make up another story up or go too far away from the original sentence. (But if it is a good story, I should make it, and come back to the sentence in the novel later. Oops, I didn’t mean that. I know that I am supposed to follow my objectives for the day and not deviate in case my foreman walks in to check to see if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing as per my announced objectives for that day. Sorry. I forgot for a second.)
I would like to comment on what you said here Greg:
…I did CWB with them on our first day together, and it quickly spun into a strange mega-detailed “story” about a student in the class, except it wasn’t a story because it had no plot line. There was too much detail because they are sort of conversational in English, so I couldn’t circle one idea for too long….
I think you may be going too wide, going out of bounds, with those kids. You may be forgetting to stay on the same word and get one word choral answers and make sure you have the same target in absolutely each and every sentence you ask until you sense it has been kind of acquired and only then can you go on to something else. Doing that is key in this work. I am not sure on this, of course, but if you are going out of bounds with them too much it very well could be because they lead you that way, trying to get their fractured English (fractured because they were not in the only classroom I know of in France where TPRS/CI is done – Judy’s.) Don’t let them do that. Jut tell them in French and hire out some jobs and try to get them to buy into the fact that they are pushing the output too much (won’t be easy) so that when they do speak in your class it is because they are relaxed and responding (unconscious output) and not forcing it (conscious output – i.e. ugly output). It’s not really helping them to force their own speech until they get another couple thousand hours of English input from you.
The last question you had was:
…I’m thinking what you’re doing with Le Petit Prince might be my key with those two groups. Something that has an underlying theme beyond what’s possible with CWB or a story, but that would still allow me to circle with them and provide us with lots of compelling input. I just have to find something in English that would fulfill that task. What’s the English “equivalent” (forgive me) of Le Petit Prince?…
There is no equivalent of that book, or there are a thousand. What appeals to you? The reason Le Petit Prince works for me is that I am deeply in love with that book. Maybe the group has some ideas of masterpieces in English. I know there has been discussion on finding one in Spanish. Latin? Chinese? I can’t imagine Chinese not having some masterpieces that will just jump off the page and pull the kids right in. Latin I don’t know. Did they live in their hearts?