The beginning of the year information on the resources link of this site (click on workshop handouts) is changing. My concept of how to best start a year to get French 1 kids ready for stories and culture study via comprehensible input, especially, is now different. How?
The first change has already been discussed in a strong thread here about three weeks ago. There is the absolute need for discipline via the rules and aggressive contact with students who don’t quite get the need for absolute silence during comprehensible input instructional time.
Failure to get the student to grasp this idea requires aggessive contact up the line to parents, counselors, deans, administrators, etc. I have been doing this aggressive silence thing – in a lighthearted but firm way – for five weeks now and it has absolutely worked.
The second thing I have noticed about this year is how powerful the Circling with Balls activity really is. It is a giving tree. In each of my level one French classes, we have so far created highly personalized CI around 5 kids, so we only have 30 to go in each class. We should be ready for stories by December, which is later than usual, but when we start the stories, the kids will be, this year, fully ready.
Of course, fledgling stories will emerge all along – what I sometimes call extended PQA, but the basic approach of ultra slow, ultra personalized, thorough circling with strong discipline is making this work in a different, more focused, way than in years past.
The next change is that I no longer do the Word Chunk Team activity described on the resource link. It’s a numbers thing. It worked with classes of 25, but now that my classes are 35 and above, there are too many people and the focus that we get with 25 kids is lost with 35. However, word chunking is alive and well in my instrcuction, just in a different form.
Instead of making it a game, with teams and all of that, I just take my wall words (six big easy to read panels of about 22 words each – we do five a day) with my level ones and we just make up goofy combinations of words and have fun and circle them.
It is so great to watch the kids grow so fast in their understanding of these chunks of words, beautifully paving the way for stories (I model this technique on vimeo and youtube – search tprs or my name).
I have also learned, these past five weeks, that the wall words can be used in conjunction with the Circling with Balls cards in order to teach the kids how to play the game of suggesting cute answers into the comprehensible input. How?
I just laser point to the wall words and say to the kids in English, “Use any of these words to suggest answers to the questions you will now hear when we start talking now about Melanie’s card.”
What that does is give them a visual anchor – the words are right there in front of them and they know them because we have gestured and played with them for weeks now in word chunking and one word images.
Their eyes fly up to the wall during the work with the cards. It is like being in a Linda Li Mandarin class for the first few days when our eyes are constantly referring/anchoring to the neatly written words behind her from previous classes. It’s just an easy way for them to learn the skill of suggesting cute – training wheels for stories, as it were, since they don’t yet have a strong roladex of vocabulary in their auditory memory bank, being first year students.
The key point here is that the first set of wall words, which are printed in really big font in the front of my classroom, drive the CI, drive the training, the norming into proper discipline, the learning how to play the game, the way to ask if they don’t understand, etc..
Those wall words just rain down on the kids and we use them at will. I strongly object to planning a set of target structures and trying to make the lesson conform to those structures. I’ve never really come out and said that, but there it is. Doing so is, in my mind, a waste of time.
Note that this free form and basically random way of pulling words from lists only applies to beginning students at the beginning of the year. The stories and reading/discussion that I am now doing with my level 2 kids are best pinned down in the formula Blaine invented.
Blaine’s formula, the three steps of TPRS, is really a giving tree as well. All of the things Blaine developed, the targeting of structures and PQA in step 1 of TPRS, the three locations in step 2, the need to move the story through those three locations to keep the content of the story sufficiently narrow and deep, only work with kids who have been properly prepared for them.
The above can be collapsed into a single idea. What we talk about doesn’t matter, especially at the beginning of the year with level 1 classes. We just make it comprehensible. When they don’t have a strong vocabulary, we provide them with one in the form of the lists from the beginning of instruction in level one.
Susan Gross has said it so many times, “Just talk to the kids!” When this is done, the results of the immersion, the clarity of the CI, all of it, lead to kids who genuinely understand the spoken language at an astonishingly high level. Can output be far behind?