Designing a curriculum based on a novel can be a very effective way to acquire a language. How to do it? The following ideas are suggested:
1. The instructor looks at the first chapter of the book and picks out the vocabulary that the kids need to be able to eventually read the chapter. The goal is that they can recognize and interpret significant vocabulary to read each chapter with ease.
2. Once you have picked out the words/structures they need, let’s say 18 for a particular chapter in a Blaine Ray book, you write a lesson plan for three days using only 3 of those structures. On the first day, you PQA the structures, on the second, you ask a story using the structures without working from a pre-written story script* (you just PQA the structures into a story on the second day), and, on the third day, you do a reading from the structures (follow Option A for reading classes described elsewhere on this site).
[*ed. note: my colleague Barbara Vallejo said, very importantly, about scripting: “When I stopped scripting I became more successful.” That is different from my own experience with story scripts, but there ya go – we are all different with different strengths.]
3. Now, it would make sense, if the above process required Monday through Wednesday for the first 3 structures to be completed, with 15 others in line to be treated in the same way, that we would do the second set of 3 structures on Th/FR/M and then the third set of 3 on T/W/Th, etc.. At that rate, it would take a total of 18 days – one month of school – to prepare that chapter.
[ed. note: I think that is where the original term “target structures” may have come from, by the way, from novels (the structures from the novel were targeted so that the kids could end up reading the novel) and not from story scripts, whose structures might more correctly be called “random structures”.]
4. With that work of teaching the targeted structures to prepare for the reading of the novel finally accomplished, we would then move into the actual process of reading the novel and the heavily mojorific process of creating a parallel story along with the reading of the novel.
[ed. note: the idea that the parallel story is possibly the most important aspect of TPRS ever is a brand new thought to me because I have always been kind of confused by the term. I thought parallel stories were something that people like Jason Fritze could do but I could never do. Now, as I said above, I can see that parallel stories might just be the super magic mojofication personalization vehicle that I have always missed in this work – my long lost CI cousin, come to make the classroom rock all year. That may not be true – time will tell, although early indicators have shown me a greater level of personalization and “breaking through” to the kids using novels than I have yet felt in a classroom.]
I use the following process for the actual reading of the chapters in the novel. It is the process that I described to John and Angela in a comment here the other day. You take the text and, going paragraph by paragraph, you do the following:
1. they read the paragraph silently or translate with a partner if they can handle that.
2. you read it aloud while they read it. (loudly and slowly).
3. you and the group chorally translate the paragraph (loudly and slowly).
4. you discuss the facts in L2, with no grammar explanations. Just a simple discussion of the facts.
5. you get a parallel character, telling the kids that you are going to publish the novel they create in May. This main character has to be a kid who shows up everyday, who is of good cheer, who has the right “vibe” to be the hero.
6. In one of my classes, a girl named Janet loves her new identity as a Mexican girl who lives in France. Going back to the paragraph for the day, you start gathering parallel details. You may say that Anne is American, but what is Janet? If Anne has five people in her family, how many are there in Janet’s? If Anne has blue eyes, what color are Janet’s eyes? Today, we learned from this kind of “parallel questioning” that Anne is Mexican, lives in France, has 33 people in her family (my 10th pd. class), of whom 13 are boys and brothers and 10 girls are sisters with 9 dads and 1 mother. First they said four mothers but then a few thought about that and we settled on one mother. Janet has red eyes. We go on and on, developing our own novel.
7. You write out each new sentence and sending it all from your keyboard onto the screen through the LCD (you can then save the story for publication as the eventual novel). This of course is great for reading, but I notice a lot of kids really studying the text as it appears on the screen. They are not aware of it, but they are learning how to write.
Just a few details to add to the above:
– a person might read the above and naturally think, “Dang! At that rate, if it takes 18 days or more just to set up the reading of a chapter in a novel, it would take all year to finish the novel! But this is stinking thinking on our part. We are buying into the old model of having to get the work done. We don’t have to finish the fricking novel. The last four chapters of Pauvre Anne should be put out of their misery and buried well under the ground once and for all. I would never make the kids suffer through that dry as dust content. I would just summarize the end of the book in two sentences and drop it in favor of something more interesting. And then I would count the days until my kids would be ready and able to read the good stuff, the French novels that have long been my companions in life in level three. Or, if the kids really want to know what happens, how Anne writes long (not!) letters to that Belgian badass boy who rides around on that non-badass non-Harley, then they can read it themselves during an SST class with a sub so you don’t have to be around to hear them groan at how shitty it is.
– the lesson plan for the above kinds of classes would contain, as a content objective (what you want the kids to be able to do at the end of the instructional process): to be able to undersand – recognize via reading and listening – high frequency words from a French novel in order to eventually be able to express themselves in the form of writing and speaking in the target language.
[credit for much of the above: Barb Vallejo, Annick Chen – Abraham Lincoln High School, Denver, CO]