I had asked the group last week for some ideas to help me snap my class out of a kind of funk that set in with my level one class when I tried to push too much reading on them (Houdini). My very strong belief in reading novels, which started about four years ago, is starting to wane.
Of course, reading novels is a fantastic form of CI, but I believe that readings based on stories (Step 3 of TPRS) – which uses Reading Option A, an idea I came up with about five years ago – is the best way to read and I need to do more of it. The reason for that is that when a reading is based on a story the kids know all the words in the reading, which is not true when they read novels no matter how much backward planning we do. Backward planning with novels doesn’t work for me – there are too many words.
(Things change and always will in comprehension based teaching and we all will have our favorite things to do and that is what is great about it – we get to choose. The confusion with all the information on this site cannot be avoided. Only a conference can really clean it up, in my opinion. But I won’t stop flooding this site with information. The basics will never change. We speak to our students, then we read what we talked about, then we write what we read if we want. Speaking emerges naturally over the years. You can’t teach speaking, in spite of foolish companies like Berlitz.)
Anyway, I got some great ideas from group members about how to exit that reading situation where we were visiting Funktown too long, and got stuck in a funk. I needed a way back on to the CI Highway, back to Funkytown, CI for my level one class, and many were suggested in the comment fields below the post:
https://benslavic.com/blog/whats-next/
Thank you for those ideas. Jen and Dennis just sent in some new suggestions this morning. The ideas are so good that I am going to make a category here on the blog called “When Stuck”.
Be clear that I’m not talking about Funkytown, CI. Funkytown, CI is that marvelous place kind of like New Orleans where the CI flows in buckets of fun, those great days (usually associated with stories) that make us want to do this method more and more and more and more. I’m talking about Funktown, where we need to get the CI train back on the road toward Funkytown and out of Funktown. (You won’t find these towns on a map, they are states of CI teachers’ minds.)
Note also that these are not bail out moves. Bail out moves are different and have their own category. They are moves to immediately, inside a single class, get out of those specific dry and boring (and very frightening) moments that we get into, usually in stories, when we don’t know what to do. Bail out moves are for the moment. When Stuck ideas are ways to get a class away from a boring activity into a good one the next day by changing activities.
If you read these suggestions from the group, you will notice that they all have to deal mainly with some form of input (listening and reading) but also allow the kids to do some form of output mainly in the form of writing. That is not the worst thing to do with unmotivated learners, I am beginning to see.
Sometimes kids need to be given output, even if it doesn’t lead to fluency, because they are in school and expect to do output, since that is all they do in their other classes. When kids are not motivated, as are most high school kids in our nation, they can be given output, in my opinion. Just not too much, as we only really learn languages in the first few thousand hours via unconscious focus on meaning in the form of listening and reading.
So here’s the first way out from Funktown, suggested by the Great North Star from Alaska, Michele Whaley:
For writing:
Following up on the idea of using embedded readings, give them three spaced-out plot points from a chapter or a story from earlier in the year, and ask them to fill in details, thus writing their own embedded reading. They could make the details more interesting than the story was, or add to it, or simply put in what you left out.
You can take some of those and make the next level of an embedded reading, leaving space again on the copy and repeat.
You can also give them a word bank or phrase bank as back-up in case they can’t think of anything. That provides some differentiation.
Listening/Reading: use some of these writes as readings; they can draw pictures (six-block pictures). Then copy or scan and project a good one and read the prompts, out of order, for them to identify.