Yesterday Anne wrote this as a comment:
I think that simple is best. If they are first-year students I would pare it down.
With that said, I really don’t know how anybody uses my scripts. I can’t even use them, now that I teach a language that is different from the one I wrote them in. The scripts are so personal to me and to my students and to what they have read and will read, that truly I am amazed that anyone else can do anything with them.
Jen, modify away, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. If it’s too clunky, you can trim it up as you go, or for the next class, or for the next story. Get in there and do it and keep doing it, because it gets infinitely easier with practice. Good luck!
Now let’s look at two things Anne said above. First:
…I think that simple is best.…
That seems obvious enough. But what does it mean, exactly? Does it mean that we need simpler story scripts? Or does it mean that we need simpler comprehensible input?
This gets into why I wrote the previous post about one story a day. I think that we are in a critical month in the sense that our kids are getting better and a few of us may be throwing a bit more coal into the engine than we need to be. I think that we need, at this point, to re-assert what doing comprehensible input even means to us. Just because our kids are getting better doesn’t give us a green light to go shooting through the intersection.
We need to be very careful of speeding up or trying to do more than we can when we read and speak to our kids in the target language. I think that I am at about i + 10 right now. That’s a little faster than my September speed of i + 5.
We really need to define what i + 1 means to us. What is the right amount of speed and content to make the input so that it is just a little higher than where the students are right now? We typically make it a lot higher, is my point, and I know I’m not alone in that. It gets worse as the year goes on. We need to stop that. We need to find i + 1 and what it means to our kids.
We do that by making our instruction comprehensible to our kids. That should be our base thought. We need to learn how to put the skills of SLOW and Staying in Bounds and Checking for Understanding into our teaching but in a more unconscious way, more in the cells of our bodies as we teach, because we need our conscious minds free to process the information we are being given during the story.
I remember when Krashen was in my classroom last year, right before the class I was a little freaked out (not too much) and I asked Diana what I should do and she was adament about making it comprehensible and that that is all that mattered. I remember that she said, “All he wants to see is if it is comprehensible!” That was the best advice she could have given and something that we need to remember every day.
Now for the second thing Anne said that I want to look at:
…if it’s too clunky, you can trim it up as you go, or for the next class, or for the next story….
My own interpretation of this is that everything that we deal with is always clunky and needs to be trimmed up but a script writer cannot put that into a script – rather, we must make the script come alive in a streamlined fashion by ourselves. We must become expert at trimming the script, as it were, as we use it. It is only a guide for our instruction.
This is a common fault in stories – we try to make the script look like the way Anne wrote it, with the variables being the only things that change. But that is limiting. On the other hand, we cannot go overly wide with the script – then we would take the story too far out of bounds and we all now what happens when we do that.
So to avoid clunky, and to create a trim story, we just need, as Anne says, to “get in there and do it and keep doing it.” That is the only way to get better at it.
Now, back to the point, I wanted to say here that the big deal is in our making it comprehensible. I don’t think this discussion about doing one story per week or one per day is really the point. The point is that we need to take whatever structures we are using and make the input comprehensible.
This entails really listening to our classes, really hearing them and being aware of what they are experiencing sitting there in our class. We could have a long script that we might see as a third year script and, by listening to our kids and just making it comprehensible, we could end up with a lovely and balanced story that would work well in a level one class.
On the other hand, we could take a very simple script and, if we were to not listen to our kids and make our instruction comprehensible, we could end up with a mess. The length or complexity of a script is not the point – the way we use the script is.
So it goes back to what Diana said to me last year with Krashen – just make it comprehensible. (By the way, on that day Krasehn was a beautiful student with a kind and soft demeanor in class – he just seemed happy to be there hearing French with the kids.)
One last thought – if we don’t make it comprehensible, and we grade our kids down on jGR, then we are jerks who are using jGR to shame them, following up on Robert’s point yesterday. We shouldn’t be using jGR unless we know how to make our instruction comprehensible.