This long passage is from TPRS in a Year! It gives some insight into what Keri was doing in her filmed class:
If your story is too carefully planned, you may feel the need to force it on your students. This prevents the story from taking the form they desire. Keeping the story loose allows the students to make the suggestions that make the story interesting. Ideas from the students are infinitely more interesting to them than your own. So don’t tell the story, ask it!
The trick of TPRS is to start with a simple story script that has three locations, and via slow personalized circling, bend the story into something new without breaking its original form.
Staying too close or straying too far from the words in the original story script creates problems. If you stay too close to the original story you shackle the new one. Interest in the story dries up due to a lack of new and personalized information.
Straying too far from the original story, however, is like switching the direction of a train onto another track, sending it into a desert where it is sure to dry up because it lacks the structures that were introduced during PQA and the other activities of Step One of TPRS (establishing meaning).
Every so often, I read the following words from Blaine to my students at the beginning of class:
…I believe people who are the most effective at TPRS don’t tell stories. They ask questions, pause, and listen for cute answers from the students….
Blaine calls this playing “the game.” I read the words slowly and deliberately so that the students know that I am saying an important thing, and to remind myself of what we want to do in our learning together.
Blaine’s words remind me to express much more interest in what my students have to say than in anything else. We must practice what we preach. If we want our kids to respond to us, then we must respond to them at an equal level.
Asking a story is not just about merely listening for cute answers. It also involves actually responding to those cute answers with warmth and genuine appreciation. People love to be acknowledged for cute things they say, and this applies not just to us as teachers but to our students.
Truly listening to your students on a heart level gives them permission to suggest outlandish things, to be bizarre, to exaggerate, and thus to play “the game”. This attitude brings the best learning. Focusing on what my students say on a heart level has brought a level of human interaction to the room that I had not previously seen.
Good TPRS depends on the quality of interaction between the students and the instructor. The students’ suggested answers to each circled question by the instructor are either rejected as impossible or absurd, etc. or accepted as obvious. So much humor occurs during this time! The students are so happy when you choose their cute answer from the others suggested. We all enjoy being funny!
Should the kids be allowed to respond in English to your questions? In my view, the students should be allowed one or two English words when answering a question. I allow them to say something like “green cow” for an answer, but not “green cow with a busted nose and drool all over his face.”
In my experience, the story can move forward wonderfully with the students saying just one or two words of English, but cannot move forward at all if this rule is broken.
Without the one or two word privilege, the students’ creativity is hampered, and the class then tends to be run by the so-called super stars. The instructor, therefore, is in the very delicate position of allowing some but not too much English, so that all students can participate in the creation of the new story.
Some TPRS instructors actually request that a student make eye contact with them before suggesting something. Whoever has the attention of the teacher gets to suggest something.
This idea is good for loud classes. It prevents the teacher from being “blindsided” by ten or even more suggestions at the same moment. Once classroom discipline is firmly established, however, this rule is not needed.
In my view, the expression “Comment dit-on…/How does one say…?”) is a clumsy expression that really doesn’t work in TPRS. Students tell me that it confuses them. Teachers trying to control the flow of information in the class don’t need a student asking for some (usually lengthy and unrelated) vocabulary.
We have touched upon the topic of classroom discipline in this text, but any discussion about how to ask a story must address it in some detail. Many of the problems encountered by new teachers in asking a story have nothing to do with their technique and everything to do with discipline.
How does the instructor reign in the sometimes runaway energy that stories sometimes engender? How does the instructor deal with repeat offenders, those students who in spite of all admonitions insist on making suggestions in English that are long and complex? In truth, these offenders are just trying to draw attention to themselves.
Such students must be made to understand that they are allowed a few English words in response to circled questions by the instructor and no more. I insist and repeat constantly to my students that they sit with 1) clear eyes, 2) straight backs, and 3) squared shoulders.
When the instructor reminds the students about proper posture, a rustle of sound usually occurs as they sit up and give their full attention. Most children haven’t been required to do this in other classes, and so it is necessary that they be taught how to do it in the TPRS classroom. Asking a story via circling cannot be successful unless the instructor repeatedly insists on the postural behavior that he or she wants from a child.
When the instructor tells a student to sit up and square up his or her shoulders with clear eyes, the instructor must wait until they actually get the response expected. Just wait. Each child must be given time to sit up with clear eyes. If the instructor is standing in front of any offender in silence while thirty people are waiting for them to respond, they must at least shift into an upright position.
Sometimes it is even necessary to give the look that says “How dare you not be doing your job in this class?” But if one student wins the mental battle on posture he or she can take ten others with them.
TPRS has failed in more than one classroom because expectations of proper behavior were not made clear and were not enforced. Students are not people whom we are here to entertain. We are in the classroom to educate students. As students, they bear responsibility, or the ability to respond, to our questions as we ask the story. How can they possibly gain this ability to respond unless we tell them how to do so: how to sit, when to speak, and generally how to play the game? Students can’t just guess at how to behave.
TPRS is not only for the motivated student. If we bring TPRS into our classroom with real conviction and loving discipline then we will reach the great majority of our students. Many kids who look unmotivated are really motivated. Someone just allowed them to wear unmotivated looks on their faces and they got to liking it because it was an easy path. [ed. note: Keri I think of Mario here.]
The true TPRS teacher can’t even conceive of students feeling like they have permission to be rude in the face of such wonderful and creative stories delivered with such expertise just for them!
As stated earlier, but worth repeating, is the idea that we cannot expect the kind of discipline described above to emerge unless we speak the target language in class. English is not the point of the class.
Matt Jadlocki once commented:
…I plead guilty to this too! I’m really into grammar and when something cool comes along I can’t help but make connections to past structures and English words and all that, and of course I do it in English under the guise of a simple grammar explanation. But 2 minutes here and 5 minutes there add up to a good chunk of time. I think it’s good to mix things up from time to time, but I [often] really let myself get away from the straight CI that is oh so important. Those two and five minute digressions from the story, however interesting, add up….
How can we expect our students to follow our rules about English when we break them ourselves? Translations by the teacher are of course necessary to establish meaning, but they must be kept brief and are usually written on the board without the use of spoken English.
Teenagers are all about fairness, and in those infrequent cases when translations are spoken in English, the students know that, since they get their one or two words of English and I get the same, the agreement about the use of English is a fair and balanced one.
I even have an English barf bag (my hand) that I “barf” English into if I find myself starting to break that rule. Speaking English is a hard habit to break, but necessary to the overall success of everything that we do.
When we avoid using large clumps of English, we send the message that we consider the language we are teaching to be something that in fact can be understood, that no default to another language is necessary, and that speaking the language in the class is our highest professional priority.
