I don’t know if anyone is doing the Jump into the Space! activity, the eighth of the eighteen step Reading Option A sequence (one way to approach Step 3 of TPRS). I just started using it in a real way lately myself, but it’s a sleeper – it’s really good. Here it is described and it has also been updated in the Reading Option A document:
How to encourage speech output in our classes that is unforced and fun? Here is one way:
With the story up on the screen, as you are proceeding along with Steps 6 and 7 above, instead of accepting one word answers (which currently in TPRS is largely the rule) invite the students to answer in fuller sentences, as they wish. Ask them to respond with good mimicking sentences in the TL as per:
Teacher: Class, does Ann have a very small light blue castle in Italy, in the suburbs of Rome?
Student: (knowing that in the text we are reading the castle is indeed in Italy, some creative student yells out plaintively, No! It’s in France!
Teacher: You think it’s in France?
Student: Yes!
Another student: It’s in Germany!
Teacher: You think it’s in Germany! It says here (pointing to Italy in the text) that it’s in Italy!
etc.
The kids know that the castle is in Italy but you have trained them to say untrue things in a spirit of play with the words as in the above example. You have told them that this is their chance to have fun speaking as long as they don’t all talk on top of each other and blurt.
How to invite such interaction? I use the expression, said in English, “Jump into the space!” and hold out my hands to the common open space in front of me there in class and invite them to fill it and then I wait.
Don’t forget to wait, sometimes for up to ten seconds or more because the kids need time to formulate what they are going to say.
Some play, some don’t. Those who do often rock the house. Far from thinking about accent or proper construction of the language, they just try to communicate for meaning. I ask them to put style and swagger into their sentences and feel as if they are French and make that pout thing with their mouth and spit R’s from the back of their throats all over the place.
The kids like it because they finally see the payoff of all the listening and because kids have a natural desire and inclination to express themselves in class.
This may be new thinking for some of us. It is for me because in the past I thought that the comprehensible input theory should dominate all activity in a foreign language classroom but now I realize that in schools that is impossible.
So we need to start developing an initiative for output in our work, an initiative that has been muted up to this point. As long as there is no forced output and it is fun there is no harm and plenty of benefit, even if only on an affective (still very important!) level. The affective aspect of our work is huge and cannot be underestimated.
SETTING UP JUMP INTO THE SPACE!
I highly recommend doing the following set up activity before doing the actual Jump into the Space! activity. It is a counting game that most of us probably do in our classrooms in some form already. It has the effect of tuning kids into each other so that they know that they can’t blurt. This game is an excellent brain break activity as well. How does it work?
The students try to count to ten as a class, but according to strict rules. One person starts by saying the number one. There is a pause in which no two students can say the number two – only one person can say it. Usually what happens is that the kids can’t past the number five.
They enjoy trying to get to ten in this way but naturally get frustrated. When two or three kids all say “three” together at the same time of course they have to go back to the beginning. In the general frustration, usually a dominant student takes over and tries to point to kids to say the next number, or get an order going around the classroom, or somehow directing things. This of course is not allowed.
Use the failure at this game to challenge the class to apply the lesson learned in the counting game to the Jump into the Space! game (some of my classes think it is a real game). I have found that it works wonderfully in that regard.
The big caution, as usual, is English blurting. Only teachers who have the intestinal fortitude to simply not allow blurting in their CI classes will be able to make the Jump into the Space! activity work.