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Compact Read and Discuss
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13 thoughts on “Compact Read and Discuss”
Does anybody know of a video where someone spends 30 min on a sentence (or 10 or 15 min for that matter)? As a beginner I just can’t imagine how to do that for that long. It seems my students would get bored after a few min of one sentence. It might be helpful just to see it done once.
I can’t think of any such video. Perhaps we can gain some insight into how to do this if we were to write out, just as an experiment, all the possible things we could say using one or two or three targets from just one sentence. If we did that, we might see how it would be possible to spend up to an hour on one sentence. Clearly, spinouts that compare what our students do with what is happening in the text would play a crucial role in such sustained questioning.
Spinning one sentence out for an hour, besides relying heavily on compare/constrast, is also very much about following the energy of what the group generates. We teachers tend to think that the responsibility for creative questioning is all up to us. But were we to listen to the cute answers suggested by the group, to taste them and share them and let the group mind go forward together, where we are only the facilitators, then we might be able to see how such a thing as Compact Read and Discuss is possible.
In my opinion, because it takes the discussion narrow and deep and not shallow and wide like normal R and D, Compact Read and Discuss is far less difficult to get off the ground than R and D, which to me is boring. I just have to remember compare and contrast.
The key point to be made here is that we need to learn to question our students in a way that keeps us in bounds while always including the same targets in every sentence we say, and yet at the same time try to keep the discussion going to places that sparkle, which we must accept is not up to us, but up to the energy created by the greater group. Another way to say it is that we need to learn to give up control by learning to facilitate and not dominate.
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/just-go-with-the-flow/
https://benslavic.com/blog/letting-go/
Brings us back to the vortex image. You’re adding as many details to 1 sentence that energy will allow, creating parallel sentences to compare & contrast. It’s much the same thing as OWI. That activity is not only to norm a class, but good CI teacher training.
That is helpful and makes sense. I think this is one KEY area where my lack of Latin fluency is a hindrance. It is hard for me to be creative (though it is coming a lot more easily at the end of the year than at the beginning) because I would often need to check the form of a word or a gender or even just what the basic Latin word is for something.
Moreover, something I’m still trying to think through and plan again for next year (and we’ve talked recently on here about this some) is how to build up the student’s vocab (especially at the beginning of the first year) so that it is CREATIVE and yet still in bounds.
Teaching this way is certainly an art and so it is helpful to have guidance from those who have done it before!
Hi Matthew,
Back a couple weeks, you’d asked about game-like stuff with younger students. I’ve tried to post, and keep getting a security error! So it won’t let me post in the Forum even though I did once today on another topic. So hijacking this topic just so I can not lose what I typed today:
Hi Matthew,
On game-like feel: I feel that there’s a multi-pronged approach that worked better for me. Here it is, all stuff I did at the same time. Feel free to ask questions as I’m typing in a bit of a hurry and may not explain well enough:
– Teach kids in bite-size pieces about SLA and how it works. (See “SLA Quotes” post in the Forum for some ideas of things to share with them.) This is re-teaching them what a language class should be. They may have thought it should all be competitive vocabulary games. Ugh. Somehow they understood that quizzes were legit, but to talk, listen, and converse about their ideas in class took time for them to think was fun.
– Make activities shorter – like 15 min. max followed by a short, physically engaging break for middle school especially. Big praises if they made it through 15 min. in the target language. Three- to five-sentence stories worked for me. Then repeat with a new student actor on the same target phrases.
– Make the language simple enough that they won’t need to signal a lack of comprehension. (My students usually wouldn’t signal even if they didn’t understand, and then they’d be frustrated and bored because they were lost.)
– I made a chart of ideas for high schoolers and simplified them for middle school. This allowed me to provide variety without having to rack my brain every week. I followed a schedule: One day step 1, two days on step 2, two or three days on step 3. Your own schedule and pace will vary.
– Whenever possible with middle school and younger, make their responses physical as well as verbal. Instead of choral answers alone, have them run to a side of the room to show their answer; have them draw instead of only imagine the story mentally; use lots of photos and props.
As for specific game-like activities, I made a video a while ago about two that I’d adapted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzm-9KuHaXM These were reading-based games that worked well for me in Chinese.
Diane, you said,
“– I made a chart of ideas for high schoolers and simplified them for middle school. This allowed me to provide variety without having to rack my brain every week. I followed a schedule…”
Would you be willing to share that chart? My TPRS worked pretty well from January to now, but my kids need some fresh ideas…
Thanks!!!
Yeah Tim – it’s been in here somewhere before. Caveats: I didn’t initially begin this document realizing that I’d share it one day, and I owe other teachers credit on many of the activities listed (but don’t know who to cite). If you know, help me by letting me know. Later additions include links and citing the teacher I heard it from.
Also, it has a little Chinese in it because that’s what I teach. It’ll probably still make sense for others. I haven’t tried everything on the charts.
Dropbox link to folder with charts I’ve used: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pp5qehu691dkmzo/AADML6qwtOH2sxVPBSqG1LpIa?dl=0
This is so great! Thank you 🙂
This is gold. Thanks for the thoughts Diane. These are very helpful and are very evident how they would help some of the problems I’m beginning to notice. You’ve really keyed in on those issues to help the younger learner.
Would you read each of your similar 3-5 sentence stories? So for example the next day would you read the two stories you were able to do the day before even though they are basically the same thing? Or would you just pick one to read with then?
If you make the language even simpler – what exactly does that mean? Limit the vocab (even more than say at a high school level)? Use only the simpler structures of the language (even though generally speaking Krashen’s theory means that we don’t need to shelter grammar)?
One reason I can think of limiting the structures for the younger students (here though I’m thinking more 5th-8th grade) is that even there some of the more complex structures of English haven’t even been acquired and if students are not going to signal they don’t understand then we ought to limit the structures for the sake of comprehension.
PS I think I got that security message on the forum too and discovered that it was because I was trying to post a link (when I deleted the link I was able to post).
Matthew, I have kids read something parallel to the things we made up in class if possible, or I make the reading have some different details at least. I don’t want what they read to be precisely from class discussion, but to feel familiar & comprehensible because of class discussion.
Language even simpler means… when I began as a CI teacher, I thought my students would recall a lot more than they did from the year before. This was a bad assumption! I was throwing in way too much “review” language into stories, and in fact many kids didn’t understand at all. They felt dumb, they wouldn’t signal. I had a small mutiny in the 7th grade class (the other classes were better off). I took a whole class period to talk about how to make things improve on my end and on theirs. This experience is chronicled in the PLC somewhere – there were a couple of posts (maybe as a “report from the field”?) with comments that helped rescue that situation that year. This PLC got me over the biggest part of the learning curve of teaching with CI. This PLC rocks!
…how to build up the student’s vocab (especially at the beginning of the first year) so that it is CREATIVE and yet still in bounds….
This year we have pointed to the role of verbs and TPR, especially, to reach this goal. We have the Verb Slam Activity, TPR, and other ways of front loading the year with verbs so that the creativity can be there for the whole year.
Julie does this by focusing on verbs and classroom objects to start. It makes a lot of sense to me because my position has always been that verbs carry nouns and not the other way around. If they know the verbs, they know the nouns. Hope that makes a bit of sense.
These different conversations on here about this have been helpful. I think now that I have some of these ideas I just need to try them in order to see how they fully work. I can already see how for next year I will be so much more prepared thanks to these conversations.
If they know the verbs, they know the nouns.
I am not sure if this is what you are saying, Ben. But it does seem that nouns are less complex. Especially the nouns that we use at the beginning they tend to be concrete: classroom objects, pets, music/sports. The verbs that we can TPR are concrete also: jumps, runs, hits. The verbs that are the problem and need the story for reps are the less concrete structures: wants to, likes to, can, knows how to. The beauty of storytelling is that it provides a meaningful vehicle to get lots of reps out of the less concrete structures.
There is another level of difficulty with verbs vs nouns. Verbs suffer greater variation due to tense, mood, person, and number. So the question is whether that holds true in languages that suffer variation due to relationship to the action (subject, ind object, dir obj) and to another noun (genitive), as well as to number, and possibly to number and gender?