Elena said this yesterday here on the PLC:
…just add a few characteristics at a time – maybe 1 or 2 or 3. No need to get a ton of details. I saw an OWI demo in Korean. We added very few details but the presenter went slowly and recycled….
Then she added:
…it was so difficult for me that I didn’t get bored. I appreciated the few details asked by the teacher. My advice is to keep it simple. Go slowly….
This is incredibly important information. In this work we must learn to ask only as many questions as our students can handle and at the proper speed. We cannot let our desire to make the story interesting derail the need of the students to understand without effort what we are saying to them.
When there are too many new sounds, our students get very good at faking comprehension. When we speak too quickly, our students get very frustrated and for no other reason that we as their teachers do not respect the fact that we know the language and they don’t.
How do we know if our students understand what we are saying to them? In comprehensible input classes, it is obvious – the students look as if they understand! We used to rely on finger comprehension checks and the stop sign (hand in fist, etc.) but those never worked. Why?
It is because in schools students are rarely taught how to advocate for themselves. We ask our students to slow us down, but they can’t. Too many teachers in their lives have ignored them in all their other classes for years in order to “cover the material”.
All lack of comprehension in our classes by our students is entirely our responsibility. To repeat: if we ask too many questions, the sounds overwhelm them. If we speak too fast, the speed overwhelms them.
A few fast processing kids will make us think that all the kids are getting it. This can be a disaster for the other kids in the class. Learn to deny the faster processors something they have always done in all of their classes: ruin the class for the other students.
We used to depend on barometer students, those slower processors who try to understand. But the barometers themselves, for the very reason that they have never been taught to interact with their teachers in most of their classes over the years, end up being of little use to us during class.
So the stop sign, the finger comprehension checks, and the barometer students that define traditional TPRS (along with mechanical circling and target structures) are in my view not important in making our work with comprehensible the best it can be.
I do advocate, however, initiating and sustaining deliberate eye contact with all of our students during the entire class period. This will insure that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind about what is going on. The skills of teaching to the eyes (Susan Gross) along with speaking slowly enough and, as Elena suggests, limiting the number of questions we ask, remain our best option for staying in touch with our students for the entire class period.
Conclusions:
1. Always ask less questions than you may want to because our students’ comprehension is more important than a good story. (Elena Overvold).
2. Always speak slowly.
3. Always teach to the eyes. (Susan Gross)
4. Only use the stop signs and the hand checks and the barometers if they work for you. They never worked for me – I lied about that. (Use them when being observed, however, so that the observer can check the “Checks for Comprehension” box on the observation sheet.)
Like Elena, we want our students to be able to say “it was so difficult for me that I didn’t get bored and I appreciated the few details asked by the teacher.” We want to be like that Korean teacher and make our instruction challenging but not overwhelming.