We can provide perfectly fine CI instruction without PQA and stories. We can even make CI work without personalization. It’s not so interesting to the kids, but it works. How? Just read a ton and spin minimally, using a kind of modified R and D.
How far to go into the D part of R and D with boring classes? It depends on the class. We should always be testing the limits of a class to become more and more human with us, but we need a safer way to do it than in PQA and stories, where we are so exposed. Call it d + 1. What does d + 1 mean?
It means that in R and D, in the D part, we ask factual questions about the text, but we then compare, and this is Jody’s idea, the characters and events in the text, in that paragraph, in that line being discussed first factually, with our students to make the discussion more personalized. It is safest to just ask a few questions and then return to the text when using d + 1.
d + 1 has the advantage over regular PQA in that we can always just return to the safe haven of the text. There is always another sentence to return to, which doesn’t happen in stories. So we are much safer with novels than stories. I would add that we can find a high degree of safety in novels by choosing novels that are always below the level of the capacity of the class to read.
Simple novels (I use French 1 novels in French 2) bring great confidence, which motivates. It takes some of the edge off of level 2 TPRS/CI classes, which are typically the gnarliest level of CI instruction, being caught between the honeymoon of level 1 and the strongly capacities in the language that we find in level 3 classes. So I call this going with simpler novels i – 1.