We assume so much. I got an email from Susan today asking what a story script is. And yet, looking back, I realize that there has indeed been no specific description of the term in all the trainings I have seen and done over the past ten years. Since 2004 or thereabouts, we just assumed that people knew what a story script is and what its intended purpose is.
Around 2001 everyone new to this work was trained in writing them and using them. They used to send and share them to the moretprs listserve all the time. But then people stopped doing that somewhere along the line. It may have contributed to the general confusion about what TPRS actually is that has reigned in successive years.
The problem with story scripts is that the original plan, as I understand it, and I may be incorrect, was to set up the reading of novels (Pauvre Anne was the first) by extracting words the kids didn’t know from the chapter of the targeted novel, taking three such words or expressions at a time, and writing them up in the form of a story just like this example from Anne Matava:
He Talks Too Much
talks
stop it!
the whole time, all the time
Troy talks too much. He talks all the time. (At this point you can find out what he talks about, in what language, etc.) He goes to the movies and talks the whole time to John McCain. John McCain says, “Shhh! Stop it!” but Troy does not stop talking. The manager comes and says, “Leave the cinema!”
Troy goes to the library. There he talks the whole time to Lexi, who is trying to do homework.. Lexi says, “Shhh! Stop it!” but Troy does not stop talking. The librarian comes and says, “Leave the library!”
He goes to the dentist. The dentist has her hands in his mouth. She can not help him, because he talks the whole time. She says, “Shhhh! Stop it!” but Troy does not stop talking. His teeth rot and fall out. He can’t talk anymore, because he has no teeth.
(Some story scripts have four targets, which is rare, most have three, and Laurie Clarcq and others are now suggesting targeting only two structures, which I agree with.)
(Find more in the Story Scripts category on this page.)
A close reading of this script reveals that a well constructed story, which this one certainly is, is just chock full of the target structures, and no new pattern of information is offered after the first paragraph. It is assumed that every single word in the story that is not a target structure has already been acquired by the students. In purist terms, it would be unthinkable to write a story script with any more new information in it than the targeted structures.
The second and third paragraph become, in this schema, optional and merely serve to get more reps, so that the story is not developed beyond what is given in the first paragraph. The only difference is that the variables are different. Variables are the underlined words that change as per the answers given to you by your students in your classroom, which provides the personalization, which is a different kind of personalization than found in PQA, which is another story.
All of this is by the brilliant design of the early TPRS people, Blaine and Susie and others: the three structures are repeated in very deliberate fashion in every sentence in each of the three paragraphs throughout the story script.
So the three words/structures targeted by Anne ostensibly were the ones in the chapter of some book that, once the story was done and read using the famous Three Steps of TPRS, the students could read and discuss what they couldn’t before. The scripts have always been conceived, therefore, as devices to set up the reading of novels. Correct me if I’m wrong on that.
But Anne and Jim Tripp went rogue and just started writing scripts, like the one above, because they were cool, because they got teens really involved, that weren’t connected to any novels. Such rogue scripts were only written and published, to my knowledge, by Anne and Jim. Except for those collections, scripts were and still are written by teachers to teach structures they want their kids to know in their own classrooms.
But not everyone can write a script. I couldn’t so I used Matava’s because I liked it that they weren’t connected to or intended to set up a novel*. They flew highest. I loved them and have used them for the past seven years, because they were better, far better, than any scripts I could come up with.
Now, this brings up the delicate topic of what a story script is most effectively used as. It is my own position that when a script is not connected to a novel, that is, when the stream of CI is allowed to flow completely naturally down the mountain without a specific goal**, the stories are far better.
For me, using a story script to set up a novel is just not as effective in bringing about general classroom hilarity as using totally free and unfettered scripts. But that’s just me. Which is why this work is so good – we each get to do CI our own ways in the ways that work best for us as individual teaching artists.
I hope, Susan, that the above sheds some light on your excellent question about what a story script is. I would very much like to hear what others say.
*There is an exception to this now in Anne’s oeuvre – in addition to two existing volumes of “rogue” story scripts, she is nearing completion, with translation help from our group members Laura Avila and Sabrina Janzcak, of ten scripts to set up the reading of the novel by Carol Gaab, Houdini.
**related: https://benslavic.com/blog/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/