Carly reports in:
Hi Ben! I have been a bit out of the loop on the blog, but I am starting to read up on what is going on and I am really excited that you are posting about your new teaching adventures. I was just reading your post Something Old/Something New, and it was getting me excited about doing stories again. At the TPRS conference in Agen, I took Daniel Dubois’ Breton classes, and watched him really milk the set-up of the character. I was so impressed that I wrote about it for some coursework I am doing to get post-conference university credit. If you think it would be a good read for the PLC, please feel free to share it there. Also, feel free to cut, edit, or paraphrase the text, all I did was cut and paste it straight from my coursework.
Strategy: Build a Character
Source : Daniel Dubois was a presenter at the conference who taught Breton in the afternoon sessions as a way to put teachers in the position of being students. He demonstrated this strategy on day two of his Breton class, after spending the first day establishing the meaning of the target structures ZO/IS, and DEUS/HAS.
Description : The teacher asks for a student actor to sit on a chair at the front of the room. Then the teacher asks for two more assistants to stand at the front and hold a bedsheet (or a jacket, a sweater, a flag…whatever is on hand)stretched between them, covering the student actor from view. Then the teacher asks the class questions in French about the character behind the curtain: Boy/girl? Tall/short? Hair color? Eye color? (Strange) physical traits? (Strange) character traits? (Strange) clothing choices? Etc. Since these are all made up details, the teacher can stretch each into a discussion, circling questions to the class and the assistants. The class can answer chorally and the teacher can pick the strongest response. The teacher can also call on individual students to give ideas. Or, if there is a class job of “professor” who always “knows” the right answer, the teacher can ultimately ask that student to decide on the details. The assistants can also be treated as the authorities because they are the only ones who can look behind the sheet to “check” the details and see if they are true. The student actor can be told in advance that he or she can nod yes or no to the assistants to give their input as to who their character is. Or the assistants can decide the opposite of what the actor picks if that can be done in a fun and friendly way. Once there are several details established about the character and the teacher feels the activity losing steam, it is time to announce the big reveal. The assistants drop the curtain to thunderous applause and the actor steps forward.
Utilization : This is a whole class activity that can be used with a beginner language class. After establishing meaning of the target structures (step1) this character building is the start of step 2, story asking. All students need to be involved in the answering of questions because that is the only way they will feel invested in what is going to happen in the story. It can take 5 to 40 minutes, depending on the energy in the room and how engaged the students are. After the big reveal, the story asking can continue with the actor acting out the plot of the story.
Objectives : One objective of this strategy is to personalize and create interest in the character so students buy in to the story asking process. Since students have a say in who the character is, they will be more interested in seeing what happens to that character in the story. Another objective is to put a lot of positive attention on the story actor without needing that actor to really do anything yet. They get to come to the front and be featured, but they are not at all a distraction because they are hidden by the bedsheet. Then when they are revealed, they are no longer themselves but a character they have to play, which helps keep them focused on listening and following the directives of the rest of the story. I can envision using this strategy in order to be able to offer the actor role to some of my more active and distractive students. Linguistically, the objective of this strategy is to get repetitions of common vocabulary and structures that have already been studied, such as adjectives, numbers, clothing items etc. If the input (the questions and answers in French) is compelling there are enough repetitions of the words in a comprehensible context, those words will be acquired by the students. At first, students are only required to show their understanding of what is being said by answering the questions with one word answers. Later in the school year, they may be able to answer in full sentences because they have had sufficient exposure to the language being used.