With new words, ask for mental associations to help the kids remember them. You can see this done occasionally in some of the videos. How to do this?
It’s simple. When you write any new words on the board in both languages, you have the option to ask this question:
“Class, how can we remember that this word means this in [the language being taught]?”
When you do this, you invite your students to make their own associations and share them with the class. Some, especially the visual learners, will make visual associations based on what the word looks like, for example when they see the word “drapeau” in French they might think of drapes on a window.
But this is not what we want. What we want our students to do is to make sound associations, since we will be speaking to them in the TL through the entirety of Phase 1 of the Star. An example is the word “malen’kiy” in Russian, which means small or tiny. The end sound of that Russian word (eee) helps me remember that it means tiny, since both words end with the same sound.
Students rarely come up with the same sound association, so it is up to you to curtail this brainstorming activity after just a few suggestions. That is because it can get a bit raucous when each student wants to share how clever they are in making their own association.
What is most important when you present a new word in the target language is simply that you give your students a few moments to make their own sound association, their own way of remembering what the word means, and then move on with the lesson.
Just remember that doing this word/sound association activity is of immense value to the students as they move around the Star. When a student later in the Star journey hears the word piscine (swimming pool) in some other context after having already made the association in the Create phase that “you don’t piss in the piscine” (sorry for the example but it’s what came to mind), the student will be far stronger in understanding your speech during the entire trip around the Star because of the sound association they made earlier in class.
It is not the focus of this text to try to describe all the nuances involved in establishing meaning using this kind of sound association activity in the Create phase. Often, students quietly make their own associations without announcing it to anyone, keeping it to themselves. Just frequently invite your students to make such associations with any new word.
Again, and this is the most important thing, our job, each time we introduce a new word, is simply to invite them to make an association and then move on.
Note: This trick of asking for a gesture or sound association to help the class remember the meaning of the word should not be ignored. Why? It is because simply putting the TL and L1 words on the whiteboard is not enough, even when you use WBYT and the Jesus rule. Doing that is only a visual event and that is insufficient. You have to get the focus of the class on the SOUND of the word, which happens in a different part of the brain than the visual part. This is where the “tasting” of the word comes in, which you can see in many videos. When the students hear the description of the tableau or story later, without the visual support of the whiteboard, they understand more quickly when they have done a gesture or word association. Word associations based in sound carry more impact than gestures. So, we use a kinesthetic tool (the gesture) and an auditory tool (the word association), while of course speaking slowly enough to allow the mind to process the sound, and the class processes all the new CI almost effortlessly. Again, just pointing to the L1/TL word couplets on the whiteboard is not enough.