Here is an even more detailed description, also from TPRS in a Year!, that connects with some of the things Keri was doing in her video. (The little images didn’t transfer from the text but the point is still clear.)
Nothing could be more important to the novice teacher than a feeling of being on safe ground at the beginning of a storytelling class.
Nothing could be more satisfying to the novice teacher than the knowledge that the story is going to develop naturally with little fuss, that it won’t have to be forced, that they can pull a story with only CI + P as described in Sample Story C, and that there will be little worry involved in preparing for a TPRS class. These things will happen if you know that:
- you are safe because you know that you don’t have to do all the skills, but only those that appeal to and work for you.
- you are safe because you know that in signing/gesturing, PQA, and extended PQA you have very powerful tools that will effectively establish meaning, not to mention a sense of fun in the room from the very beginning of class.
- you are safe because you know that you can spend as much or as little time as you wish doing PQA and/or extending it. You feel confident knowing that you can move away from them into a story at any time.
- you are safe because you have a scripted story completely written out in front of you. All you have to do is replace the information provided in the scripted story with your own and let the story build, sentence by sentence. The first sentence in the scripted story becomes the first sentence in your story, with personalized variations. The scripted story sits in front of you like a good friend, waiting in the wings with the next scripted sentence for your story as soon as you are ready for it.
- you are safe because you have nothing to focus on except personalizing each new sentence from the story script in front of you. In Sample Story A one single word – “smiles” – was repeated for 45 minutes amidst frequent laughter. Then, when it felt right all I had to do was start the story, letting facts emerge as natural extensions from the scripted story, and so a strange looking dog looked at Elizabeth and smiled, Simon threw a chicken at the dog, etc., and everything evolved sentence by sentence. I did not think of these things before the class. They just emerged as I tried to personalize each new sentence from the scripted story. Thus, because our discussion was not pre-fabricated, it was alive.
- you are safe because you know that you don’t have to get anywhere during class. You don’t have to stay in or leave PQA/extended PQA at any certain time. You don’t have to do anything but speak in the target language while keeping the focus on your students. At its base, teaching a language is a very simple thing that unfortunately has been made complicated, but now is becoming simple again.
Here is a visual metaphor that helps me feel safe. At the start of a class I sometimes think of a little TPRS “room” in my mind. The floor is tiled. Each tile, in order starting in the upper left hand corner of my field of vision, has one of the sentences from the story I will be using in my scripted story:
So the story is metaphorically the floor, the foundation, for the work I am trying to do. I go from tile to tile, from sentence to sentence in creating the new story.
Then I look to the wall to my left. It has a bunch of picture frames on it, each with an imagined photo of each of my students in that class:
This reminds me to personalize the sentence I am on. Thus, if the story script says, “A boy wants to buy his mother a gift,” it becomes through personalization, “Alex (from French class) wants to buy his dog a car.”
Then I look to the wall to across from me. It has a bunch of circles on it:
I start circling the new personalized sentences. I remember to point and pause when I circle.
[ed. note: we don’t really need to circle any more. All we need to do is ask the next interesting personalized question that comes into our minds.]
Next, I become aware of the wall to my right. On it is one of those “Slow – Children Playing” signs:
It reminds me to circle the personalized sentences slowly. Whenever I finish the process with one tile I go to the next one. The story unfolds in a stable way, thanks to my visual metaphor. Of course, the ceiling is made up of CI, which keeps the lid on the class, so to speak.