Chris Stoltz (Vancouver) reports:
Hey Ben –
I’m sitting in the Von Ray workshop (he has his dad’s eyes) as he demos TPRS in German. Since it’s my first language I am just watching audience and note a few things:
A) SLOW rules. A word a second. It feels like he’s CRAWLING and when he asks a question whose answer is in TL but more than ja/nein even that is too fast for these early days processors.
B) compound statements should be generally avoided early days (eg “she is happy cos she has an elephant”)– you can feel how hard it is for ppl to put these 7 diff words together. I would do this in 2 parts first and circle it before making it compound.
C) He is AWESOME at Point and Pause which is also crucial even for these egg-head four-percenter teachers.
D) he’s doing a story to demo TPRS. This is MASSIVELY HARD– the # of words you wouldn’t think you need to actually teach, but do,– like the, or, and, with, etc– are not as obvious and easily picked up as you would think. I would generally concur with your advice to do slow PQA in varying forms for the first 20 hrs or so until the kids have like 100 words absolutely hardwired in. There is a kind of invisible “feel” for how the words sound that even these eager beavers don’t have and will just need TIME to develop.
E) He hasn’t done any TPR (no time) but he uses props (fake money and toy elephants). Very useful. He said that he would do a bunch of pre-story TPR and pqa before getting into a story.
F) Adrian Ramírez did a Portuguese PQ demo followed by the Japanese-speaking teacher doing a Japanese demo of basic PQA. The Portuguese was easy…the Japanese, holy cow it was HARD! Despite her doing a great job, the sheer weirdness– subject object verb; other odd rules– meant that for even us keeners, she had to go slow as mud flowing uphill to keep us focused. Von talked about how the first 20 hours in TL are mostly for developing basic skills like being able to “feel” the language sounds and just, well, being able to distinguish one word from another. After the Japanese demo, I could not agree more. Slow RULES.
G) also neat to watch beginner TPRSers practice circling. Skipping parts of it, introducing question words too soon, introducing new details too soon, or not repeating your basic structure often enough, will really screw your students up.
Anyway. Hope your startup has gone well.
Chris