Have you ever seen a pro football player start running before he catches the pass? He has to catch the pass first and then start running.
So also with us, we have to have the fundamentals down. I print the following suggested fundamental sequence for a CI class. It and Class Sequence B (to follow this post) is not the “right” one because there is no such thing in our work other than making ourselves understood to our students (sending “understandable messages” as Bob Patrick says), but I offer it in hopes it might help someone at this tough time of year.
The passage is taken from my updated version of Stepping Stones to Stories and refers to super min stories but applies to regular stories as well:
Suggested Class Sequence A
In any super mini story, we can basically follow two sequences. In the first, we:
1.Say “this means that” for each target (i.e. we establish meaning).
2.Decide with the class on a gesture for each verb that we want to teach.
3.Do some PQA around the target structures, using our PQA counters.
4.Create the mini story, using our story writer, story artist and timer. When we do this, we go line by line working from the script as explained later in this text.
5.Give a quiz – written by our quiz writer during class – on the created mini story.
6.Discuss any art work created by your story artist (either on the document camera or on an interactive whiteboard).
7.Collect the story (written during class in English by your story writer), translate it and present it to the class the next day. You may want to embed a few new words in the reading, but just a few.
What happens when we do comprehensible input as described in the above paragraph cannot be repeated enough. It is the formula for Coke. Why? Because when you go through the above sequence your stories work just fine, as long as you create the story line by line with slow in-bounds circling and keep the students focused on the meaning of what you are saying and not on the vehicle used to deliver it, the words. Bring up actors if you want, but follow the guidelines give later in this book about working with actors.
Simplified from the seven steps described above down to the famous Three Steps of TPRS, the storytelling process is always about:
1. establishing meaning (just say “this means that”, getting gestures from the kids and then practicing the targets via PQA, etc.).
2. getting reps on the targets (now via the mini stories, later via full stories, MovieTalk, Look and Discuss and the rest of the CI arsenal we have).
3. reading what you created with them.
So we learn that when we do super mini stories and when we do comprehensible input in general the external form that the story takes is the only thing that changes. The underlined variables change in each class, but the story is the same. We always use the same internal drive train process, those steps outlined above, to provide our students with comprehensible input instruction when doing super mini stories.
The strategies presented in this book work because of the internal drive train process outlined above. After you master these, you will start to create other strategies that reflect your own teaching personality, and you will create them not because you have to but because you want to. But use the above seven steps as training wheels first.
Far too many people think that there is some external formula for teaching using comprehensible input, which really confuses people and leaves our work on the fringes of language education. But there is no external formula. There are only the process described above, no matter what the activity, and why Blaine Ray should be credited for it, because he invented it.