On Friday, one of my students, without being asked, told me that she had written and memorized a story using some of the words from our Word List wall. She had also drawn from a list of prepositions and articles (and how they combine) on the wall directly over the Word List.
I didn’t ask her to do the work – she just wrote the story out below during the week and then memorized it. Then she came in yesterday and asked if she could tell her story to the class.
Note something here – this first year student was both writing and speaking her story. She was outputting the language. It’s the earliest example of output (what I call celebratory output, unforced, not forced) that I have ever seen, by far, in a student with no prior knowledge of the language.
Here is what she wrote, with a few edits from me and the source words she chose from the Word List on the wall in bold:
Marie, lave les mains!
Marie, wash your hands!
Maman sourit et boit de l’eau.
Mom smiles and drinks some water.
Je marche à la table aussi.
I walk to the table too.
Je mange le poisson mais le poisson chante.
I eat the fish but the fish sings.
Je me lève très rapidement et je vais à maman.
I get up very fast and go to mom.
Je lui dis, “Maman, regarde…ne mange pas le poisson!”
I say to her, “Mom, look…don’t eat the fish!”
Le poisson chante.
The fish sings.
Maman dit, “Stupide! Les poissons ne chantent pas!”
Mom says, “Stupid! Fish don’t sing!”
Je vais à la table et lance un crayon au poisson.
I go to the table and throw a pencil at the fish.
Le poisson attrape le crayon dans la bouche.
The fish catches the pencil in its mouth.
Le poisson sourit.
The fish smiles.
Je me lève.
I get up.
Je suis fatiguée.
Of course, when I got over my shock that a first year in student in October was speaking a rather lengthy memorized text to her classmates right there in our classroom (with some of the kids translating and enjoying her French), I waited until she was finished and then quickly began circling what she had said (I scribbled notes in English while she was reciting), but we quickly ran out of time.
However, we will certainly start a formal story, Step 2 of TPRS, on Monday and I will write it up for Tuesday for both my French 1 sections (it will greatly expand from the text above), and we will read the new story on Tuesday.
It is good timing, as the Circling with Balls/Cards were about done and the One Word Images were losing energy, and I was looking around for some simple Anne Matava stories to start this first year class out on a story next week anyway. I also wanted to get some reading going next week but didn’t want to start with something that they hadn’t created.
(I am more and more firmly in the camp of student generated readings from student generated stories, the whole thing that started in Alaska, and not materials published by someone else. It is not too difficult to quickly write up stuff during our planning periods and after school. Jim Tripp has been working a lot in how student generated materials can be shared across class periods as well, so there is a lot of energy here, and I predict that, although the next five years will see the selling of a lot of mediocre books for TPRS kids, I don’t think that they’ll be able to create the interest that writing up our kids’ stories will do. At upper levels, with the teaching of culture as per Paul Kirschling, yes, but not at levels one and two.)
What this “happening” says to me is that we should be open and attentive to anything that our kids might generate for our classes. We should be more and more open to the details of how Michele and her group in Alaska are developing student generated work as a base of pedagogy and not just as a frill. Of course, Duke would agree with this!
This student just happened to mention to me before class that she had done this little project, and if I had not been listening fully to her, if I had been pre-occupied with other things, as we are apt to do as teachers, I would have missed what may be one of the most singular events in my teaching career.