Michele sent this as a kind of follow up to her regular Thursday blog. Jody’s regular Saturday blog will follow here shortly. The original article from Michele was much longer.
For those who want to pursue this further, I will put the longer version of Michele’s blog below this shorter version, under the dotted line. It is testimony to the slowly expanding galaxy that we are currently in.
What we are into here is not a static thing. The opposition, the turmoil, the solid base amidst that turmoil in the form of Dr. Krashen’s research, none of this is contracting. It is expanding.
Many fireballs are moving upward and outward in a slow motion dance of incredible wonder. Each class we teach – failures or success it matters not because it is our intent and not the result that counts – reflects a movement and a change far greater than anything our minds, or the minds of those who dismiss our intense work as frivolous, can fathom.
Michele:
I have lately been exchanging ideas with the president of our state Bilingual Association on methods that encourage effective language acquisition. What I am finding is that the principles of TPRS and the principles of other successful methodologies overlap in a big way.
One example comes from this article: “Scaffolding Literacy meets ESL: : some insights from ACT classrooms,” by Misty Adoniou & Mary Macken-Horarik and can be found in TESOL in Context, Vol. 17, No. 1, August, 2007, pp. 5-14.
Scaffolding Literacy (SL) has four steps for reading a selection that is compelling and age-appropriate for students, rather than simplified. The reading then flows into writing.
First, the teacher tells the story of the selection to the students in a comprehensible way, possibly using some of the vocabulary from the text as well as visuals and graphic organizers if possible and appropriate. The teacher reads the selection with the students, making sure that they understand it, asking questions that they will be able to answer because knowing the answer gives confidence. “Questions are formulated to ensure that students will be able to answer them.”
The teacher then picks a short segment to examine in depth, explaining word choice and asking more questions that the students can easily answer.
Next the teacher uses cardboard strips with sentences from the extract to let students cut out and rearrange pieces, explaining why and how dropped or rearranged phrases alter meaning. Finally, the group looks at specific words, determining what parts of the words do to give meaning.
After the close focus, the students do a patterned write based on the excerpt.
Teachers in the study were delighted with their students’ improvement in comprehension and writing fluency, and students were excited.
There are many places where SL overlaps the concepts we’ve been discussing on Ben’s blog. For one, the initial stages mimic what Laurie has taught us about embedded readings. Another key is that the teachers make sure that the input is comprehensible and compelling. (The only piece they’re missing is the story-asking.) In Anchorage, Marcia Myers shared how she improved writing in her classes by giving students the chance to rearrange scrambled texts of familiar stories. The focus on word “chunk” meanings is very similar to our grammar pop-ups. And using a text as a language frame from which students can write is just a twist on Anne Matava’s stories, where the students fill in their own details.
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The longer version:
I’d like to comment on the third of three very interesting articles on language acquisition that our Bilingual Ed department sent me. These articles are fascinating, because there’s so much crossover between successful methods. I’m afraid I have deeply offended my district FL head by suggesting that by getting together with the Bilingual and Native Ed people, we could figure out together what language systems are having the best results–by comparing what is common to the most successful routines–I am finding that TPRS is the umbrella that combines all the techniques, and it’s just blowing my mind. Krashen is RIGHT. We do have the best thing out there.
The article is called, “Scaffolding Literacy meets ESL: : some insights from ACT classrooms.” It is by Misty Adoniou & Mary Macken-Horarik and can be found in TESOL in Context, Vol. 17, No. 1, August, 2007, pp. 5-14. I’m going to try to summarize it through brief explanations with quotes that show close links to the ideas we share in TPRS.
Scaffolding Literacy (SL) suggests that by giving language-learning students the chance to read age-appropriate texts in a way that they will understand, we can insure faster acquisition than if we give them simplified texts. It doesn’t come right out and say “compelling” texts, but certainly implies that understanding. Reading this article made me think of what we are doing when we write embedded texts as Laurie has taught us, because those lead to reading successively more complex texts. In fact, every part of this SL method involves something that is either an established part of TPRS or a twist that members of Ben’s blog have suggested at some point during this school year.
The process suggested in SL is that teachers start by telling students a story they will read, thus “bringing the learner closer to the text.” It is crucial to set “all students up for success…particularly those who may have experienced minimal success in language-based tasks.”
“Students’ attention to language is distributed…so that they focus on the knowledge about language that is relevant…grammar is put in the service of language learning rather than taking on a life of its own…”
“It is essential that texts selected for reading contain more language features than the learner can currently read without support, but not so many new features as to cause overload.”
“Rather than relying upon more familiar pre-reading prediction strategies such as questioning “What do you think this story is about?” “What do you think will happen next?”, the students are ‘told’ the text in a story telling mode. Teachers can draw on the illustrations (with younger readers’ books), the story’s meaning and even some of the author’s language in their oral-telling of the story. Teachers are encouraged to use the wordings of the text, especially those likely to be difficult for students, in their orientation to the text so that students are better able to predict these when they read the text later. Once the teacher has talked about the text with students, s/he reads the text to them.”
“After the story (or a chapter for longer texts) has been read to the learners, an excerpt of about a paragraph’s length is selected for closer study. . .teachers choose extracts that will provide good models for writing. During Language Orientation (LO), the teacher talks learners through the wordings of the extract, guiding them to identify these and making explicit why particular words and phrases were chosen by the author (the role they play in the story). Questions are formulated to ensure that students will be able to answer them.”
“The teachers were impressed by the way in which LO enabled teacher talk to become student talk. As one teacher put it, ‘This is a real confidence builder for shy children. I’m modelling the answers I want, which they can repeat’.”
Modeling is exactly what we do in TPRS. We let them hear the correct language and process it without having to think of the answers.
“Many teachers noted that they themselves only became aware of these areas as specifically challenging . . . as a result of doing the careful analysis and talk about language that the LO requires of the teacher. The question and answer routine described above took both the teacher and the students into layers of meaning which they might miss ordinarily. As one teacher said, ‘Analyzing text closely reveals layers/ strategies/ effects that even you (me!) as a skilled “proficient” reader hitherto missed.’”
The next part of the method involves writing excerpts onto strips of cardboard and cutting off sections for rearrangement. The teacher explains how meanings change if parts of the sentence are dropped or if the order is altered. In comparison to the way a teacher might use the method in a first-language classroom, the second-language teacher tells students how the meaning changes, rather than asking what sounds right, or how the meaning changes. This difference is very close to the difference between the “gotcha” game in grammar drills and the frequent pop-ups we find in a TPRS classroom. Marcia Myers in Alaska mentioned that by doing similar drills of reorganizing scrambled pieces of familiar texts, her students were able to read more fluently and then spell more correctly.
After that, teachers and learners examine excerpts for spelling, discussing what chunks of spelling determine meaning.
Finally, the end of the work with the passage gives students a chance to do patterned writing. Students do essentially what we do with Anne Matava stories, rewriting the excerpt in such a way that it reflects their choices or their lives. They use a language frame that is similar to the language frame that Laurie gives her beginning students to write about Poor Anna.
The excitement the ESL teachers are reported to have experienced in their classrooms as a result of using SL reflects the excitement TPRS teachers find as they develop their skills. TPRS teachers can certainly see numerous overlaps between what we know works in TPRS and the SL method. The extra twist, which is to do all the pieces based on the same excerpt, may speed acquisition of the tools students need for fluent writing. I’m challenged to take one short text and focus on it for my last two weeks of school. As a TPRS teacher, I would of course start by asking the story, and following that with reading our class story, rather than by telling them a completely non-connected story.