Another thing that has been working is to take a class that is reticent to speak, like my level fours (who still think that learning French means constructing it in written form and correcting spelling), and asking them to write a little story for the first ten minutes of each class, then collect it, make the corrections or suggest areas that can be changed during my planning period, hand it back to them the next day, let them write the second day with a partner (they combine their text with that of their partner), and, after four or such such ten minute writing periods, they end up with a cute little story that has grammatical accuracy. Then I take those and put them on the overhead or LCD, and the class translates them together with the me laser pointing at the words. I always ask for clarification from the author – they become a kind of expert and it creates more CI. Really, I am using their text as a basis for CI, always testing the waters for a story.
Since the text was written by one of them, it is naturally more interesting (all of this comes from Michele’s idea of student generated stories, as a riff on her original idea). So, every three or four sentences, I circle the hell out of whatever is up there. Just circle the hell out of it, I can’t say it another way. Thanks to Jennie on that point. By circling it so much, they forget that French is hard. My questions are always one word answer questions. If they can’t answer with one word, it is not circling.
This leads into more discussion. Now, the deal is, the massive reps of simple information that is projected there in written form, information that comes from them, is what drives in the French. And a really cool thing about that is that you can riff into weird stuff during the discussion. Like today we were reading a text by a kid about a girl with a real shrill voice. I went right to the obvious – some PQA about who has the shrillest, most annoying and toxic voice in the world. Then, when the circling and PQA lose energy, there is more text on the overhead to return to, or if the text is over, another one waiting in the wings.
I am not describing anything new here, but just a variation on making this stuff work. Having a text right there in front of them, written by them, seems to make a difference in interest level. Using massive circling and then PQAing whatever section of the text we are on seems to elevate the level of personalization. It keeps me safe because I always have more text to fall back on.
I often have to suppress entire new story lines from erupting, doing so because of the recent discussion here that we should try to avoid gettin too far afield with new vocabulary, but rather keep the text close to home with known vocabulary, introducing very limited amounts of new words.