Greg asked:
Ben, what’s your view on “CAN” – “Confidence, Accuracy, No Hesitation”? It’s the Blaine Ray idea that we should not go on in a story or in our instruction until actors or students respond to questions accurately. Specifically, see page 6 on this document:
http://www.mena.northwestern.edu/documents/TPRS-workshop-handout.pdf
Here is the passage from that document by Blaine that Greg is asking about:
TPRS® is taught a sentence at a time. When we teach a sentence we talk to student actors. We teach the sentence until we see confidence in our student actors.
The student actors either answer our questions or read the answer from the board. When our students hesitate or show a lack of confidence in any way, we label this a breakdown.
For example, we establish a detail of the story by saying, “Sharon is in Vermont.” We then turn to the student and ask, “Sharon, are you in Vermont?”
Sharon then answers, “Yes, I am in Vermont.”
The student either answers the question with confidence or hesitation. for answers that show:
We are always looking
No hesitation
Breakdown tells us we need to practice the sentence more. We practice the sentence in two ways:
Circling
Add a character – Adding a character allows us to practice the verb. One of the characters we add is ourself. This allows us to speak to the characters about ourselves, the other characters and him/herself. This questioning process is very engaging for the class and the student actors.
For example, “Sharon, are you in Vermont?” “Yes, I am in Vermont?” “Am I in Vermont?”? “No you are in Virginia.”
The questioning continues to Sharon and to the class. If Sharon needs more practice we add another character. “Is Megan Fox in New York?” (The class guesses and then the teacher says, “Yes, Megan Fox is in New York.”)
Now we can talk to a student who plays Megan Fox and also talk to Sharon. We can talk about any of the characters to the class and to the characters. This keeps the class interesting yet gives the students tremendous repetition of the verb.
When students show confidence and accuracy then we don’t circle and we don’t add a character. We work on storyline. We just add more details to the story using different verbs until we see breakdown. When we see breakdown, we go back to the above steps or circling and talking about the different characters that have been established.
To give our students even more practice we also go back and review details of the story that have already been established. We review facts about all of the characters that have been introduced and also facts about ourselves.
Sometimes we have an interesting fact that can be embellished or fleshed out. This is done by going back in time. We call this an “event” or a “back story”. We start out the event by saying a time expression like: “one day.” This expression tells the students we are going back in time and filling in information that we left out the first time through the story.
My response:
When Blaine says that the circling process described above “…is very engaging for the class and the student actors….? this is probably true for him, but I could never get it to work for me even though I tried it for 15 years. Some other thoughts:
1. As I understand it, the research indicates that the deeper mind hears the language (receives comprehensible input) over long periods of time in a natural and effortless way and we can’t predict when that input will manifest as speech. It depends on the processing speed of the listener and also on many other factors. So the ability to instantly respond (thus avoiding what Blaine calls “breakdown”) seems dependent on a very wide variety of factors. There is just too much going on in our students’ individual heads that we cannot possibly, in my opinion, herd the students’ minds in what Blaine calls an “interesting” process but for me puts me AND my students to sleep. Different strokes for different folks and no blame….
2. “CAN” as described above puts mental pressure on the student to respond correctly. If the student experiences “breakdown”, it helps Blaine in his instruction, but it hurts students who don’t like to be seen as not capable of responding correctly in front of the group. Their affective filters goes way up.
3. The research is elegant and simple, as I see it. Either the child is pleasantly focused on the meaning of the message and not on the vehicle being used to deliver it, or not. But it sounds as if “CAN”, by pulling the process into the conscious mind, forces the class into a situation of performing. In my view what Blaine describes above is not unforced, stress free, and unconscious. It’s forced, stressful and brings the conscious mind into play too much. It’s not like when they learned their first language.
4. I don’t think that it is necessary to talk that much to student actors, as Blaine says in the first sentence above. I know why he said it, though. He is trying to coax some speech output from the student actors. Why do that? The way I understand the research echoing point (1) above, is that we cannot be forced to speak the language, to be put on the spot in any way. I am amazed that Blaine is trying to get his students to speak like that. It seems so contrary to everything I know about his work and about the research, which says no forced output.
5. Blaine says that “breakdown” tells us we need to practice the sentence more. What is breakdown? Do we break down when learning our first language? Looking for breakdown is like hammering the input in one nail at a time when no nails are needed, just waves and waves of pleasant comprehensible input (easy on the student and the teacher both) and some goes in and some doesn’t and then when the students sleep the process of parsing out some words – as ready to be accepted into the growing language system or not – happens. The process is under our unconscious command and so why “practice” it? That activates conscious thinking and that is not how the research says it happens.
6. I thought we were done using celebrities for many reasons all having to do with equity.
This discussion just proves that we are all different and that there is no one way to teach stories using comprehensible input. When I asked kids questions like if a student was in Vermont or Virginia I would get almost an automatic eye roll, shifted body weight and an uncomfortable, forced response. The student and I would look at each other and the class would look at us and we all knew that the question was lame. And I would keep up my fake smile going like I was enjoying it but inside I wanted to scream.