Each year the discussion here reveals rich new lodes of thought that illustrate and describe that this way of teaching will always be about change. It will never be static and it will never take the form of concrete.
The change we are in will never be about false change (thinking that computer programs in SLA are a new “trend” away from the book when all they do really is provide another confused form of the book). Of special interest to me is a trend toward speech and writing output from CI kids.
I remember four years ago facing a class of 35 traditionally taught kids at Abraham Lincoln High School on the first day of class and explaining that they would largely listen to and read French that year. There was an almost audible sound of air being let out of the first day excitement ballon. One girl said, “You mean we can’t speak?” I didn’t get it at the time – I was firmly behind my CI input guns four years ago.
But this year I have seen teachers on this blog bring to our attention the need for more student output. We have always had a focus on limited writing output (free writes and dictée) and almost no focus on early speech output because we knew correctly in terms of the research about the vast amount of time needed for authentic input to bring authentic output – far more time than we have in our classrooms (thousands of hours vs. a few hundred hours over a four year period).
And if we have any degree of professional integrity we just can’t put our students into groups to waste time doing tasks that they can’t do. But as a result of the discussion here over the past year in particular I would like to bring up with the group our need to really respect the emotional, if not practical, need that kids have to DO things in our CI classrooms besides listen and read all the time.
The two new output oriented strategies that have affected my thinking the most on this topic are OWATS (Bob Patrick) and vPQA (Julie Soldner*). OWATS really gets kids involved in writing output and and vPQA with speaking output. It’s an amazing thing but both strategies are fully consistent with best CI practices and yet they invite lots of output from the kids.
Why is this necessary? Why is this a good trend in our work?
Suzy Livingston addresses that point. Suzy teaches at Front Range Christian School in my part of town and we went to see Julie Soldner teach together in January. New to TPRS/CI, Suzy was very surprised to see a TPRS class where kids spoke a lot with almost no affective filter. She didn’t know that that could happen with TPRS kids.
Before meeting and observing Julie, she one of a vast army of language teachers who have dismissed TPRS out of hand precisely because of our almost complete focus on input. They may not have the research correct but that one fact is enough for them to say that they don’t want to have anything to do with it.
Suzy said quite succinctly that what she saw in Julie’s classroom was how PQA based on images “feeds the need of the students to speak and write. Output is a personal need and not an option in learning a language.”
It’s something to think about. If there is an emotional need to come into a classroom and DO something then we might want to look at that need as we plan for next year. An important point to make here is that OWATS and vPQA are both so well designed that there is no need for us to create more output activities than those two along with free writes and dictée. Those four things are enough.
*To be clear, lots of teachers in DPS use PowerPoint slide presentations. The reason I keep focusing on Julie’s is that she has figured out a way of sequencing her classes – described here in a post yesterday – that is so fine and subtle that it magically gets kids talking. I didn’t see that in any of the other DPS classrooms I observed this year. I saws great input instruction using slides, but I didn’t see the output I saw in Julie’s classroom – that is why I say that vPQA (the term is from Ruth Fleishman) is an invention of Julie. Just to be clear on that point.