Blaine came up to me some years ago – I think it was NTPRS 2009 in TX – and asked what I thought about Susie saying that the kids should “snow plow” through the book or if perhaps (his) Read and Discuss was better. I remember that the topic was “up” at that time.
I told him I did R and D because I liked the idea that kids were able to use what they read as a basis for class discussion in L2, paragraph by paragraph. I thought it was silly to just plow through the book and would probably bore the kids, even though Susie always said that reading should be like “a movie in [students’] minds” when they were reading.
(In 2009 all we had was Blaine’s books; it was very hard to get those clunkers looking like a movie in the kids’ minds because clunk is clunk.)
So I never really tried the snowplow thing, never gave it a chance, thought it would be too boring. But now I am looking at it again, probably because of the better books. I’m not even now sure Read and Discuss is a good thing, after touting it here for so long.
R and D might just be too “busy”, switching kids around in their brains, with some L1 always sneaking into the Discuss part of it, when really the class should be about reading, where the BIG gains come from, more so than from stories.
The fact is that R and D does not create the movie thing described by Susie and why did I not do exactly everything as Susie said? I can see now that the “movie” is what reading input should really look like. Why? Because as has been stated here countless times over the years, it directly involves bypassing the conscious faculty, which is where languages are acquired.
So, in the same way that when we do stories the kids aren’t aware of the language but of its meaning, so also should that be the case when we do reading So in my opinion Susie was right. The exception for me is using the 18 pt. ROA strategy when reading stories, which for me is the cat’s ass, but different from reading novels.
A major ingredient in this discussion that we didn’t know six years ago on this blog is that readings should be below the kids’ levels, that texts that are too challenging activate the kids’ conscious analytical faculties as they try to “figure it out”, and that’s not how we learn languages.
This thinking was all prompted by something Jim said a few weeks ago about how his kids like it when he just reads to them and they just follow along (although he may have meant that he reads to them in L2). All I know is that in a class just now I read straight through some Brandon Brown chapters i L1 in a gentle voice and the kids just loved it.
At the end of each chapter they asked some questions about grammar things they had noticed while I was reading like why his could both be sa and son in French. (This made me very happy and I ran to the board for a marker so the true me could come out as I explained those lovely and pesky little possessive adjectives.)
When I asked my students about the “discuss” part – the way we had been doing it all year up until now when reading a novel, a few of the more honest ones said that, whereas they indeed like discussing readings of stories that they create, they don’t like discussing novels, for the reason that they are generally boring.