Using emergent targets, for me at least, has invited much more creativity into my work. I am looking forward to starting the year next year with no targets, because I foresee much more engagement and trust from the kids. The trust comes from the facts that a) using emergent targets honors their voice, interest, and creativity and b) the new jobs hand over much of the control of the storytelling/review/literacy process to kids, so the class is more student-centered than it was without the Story Driver and Professeur 2 (especially) and 3) the kids sensed that the stories were freer and more responsive and that they would actually include a fun plot that – this is important – wrapped up! So they will, I think, be able to trust us more that we will share control with them as well as tell interesting, responsive, and satisfying stories.
Putting people above the language is the most key aspect, to me, of untargeted work. The high frequency words will be used with high frequency whether or not we target them. That is why they are high frequency. You basically have to use them to communicate.
I also see this as a question of distributed versus massed practice. I have found, for me and my kids, that distributed exposure (over time, in many contexts) to a word or structure/phrase/expression is best for acquisition. Massed practice (where we repeat it many times in a few sessions), for me at least, is not as effective. Using the HFW in a less-intentional way allows for a more natural, spaced-out (distributed) exposure to the words. And then too, the fact that the stories are more responsive and emerge from the actual people in the room, makes for more engagement, and of course engagement is the cornerstone, the foundation of any comprehension-based language acquisition program. If they did not attend to the input, how will they comprehend it, and thus acquire language?
And, hey, looks like there is some research to back up my teacher/learner experience in thinking that distributed exposure to the vocab (even HFW) could very well be more effective than massing the exposures in a targeted situation. This just in from the American Federation of Teachers:
Kristine Bloom and Thomas Shuell (1981) taught 20 new vocabulary words to high school students enrolled in a French course. Students either studied the words for one 30-minute session (massed) or for a 10-minute session on each of three consecutive days. The groups were indistinguishable on a test administered immediately after practice, with each group remembering about 16 of the 20 words. A retest administered four days later, however, showed that the distributed practice group still remembered the words (15 words correct), whereas the massed practice group forgot much more (11 words correct).
Another study was conducted by Cornelius Rea and Vito Modigliani (1985) with third-grade students. In this experiment, one group was taught spelling words and math facts in a distributed condition and another in a massed condition. A test immediately following the training showed superior performance for the distributed group (70 percent correct) compared to the massed group (53 percent correct). These results seem to show that the spacing effect applies to school-age children and to at least some types of materials that are typically taught in school.
Using emergent targets, for me at least, has invited much more creativity into my work. I am looking forward to starting the year next year with no targets, because I foresee much more engagement and trust from the kids. The trust comes from the facts that a) using emergent targets honors their voice, interest, and creativity and b) the new jobs hand over much of the control of the storytelling/review/literacy process to kids, so the class is more student-centered than it was without the Story Driver and Professeur 2 (especially) and 3) the kids sensed that the stories were freer and more responsive and that they would actually include a fun plot that – this is important – wrapped up! So they will, I think, be able to trust us more that we will share control with them as well as tell interesting, responsive, and satisfying stories.
Putting people above the language is the most key aspect, to me, of untargeted work. The high frequency words will be used with high frequency whether or not we target them. That is why they are high frequency. You basically have to use them to communicate.
I also see this as a question of distributed versus massed practice. I have found, for me and my kids, that distributed exposure (over time, in many contexts) to a word or structure/phrase/expression is best for acquisition. Massed practice (where we repeat it many times in a few sessions), for me at least, is not as effective. Using the HFW in a less-intentional way allows for a more natural, spaced-out (distributed) exposure to the words. And then too, the fact that the stories are more responsive and emerge from the actual people in the room, makes for more engagement, and of course engagement is the cornerstone, the foundation of any comprehension-based language acquisition program. If they did not attend to the input, how will they comprehend it, and thus acquire language?
And, hey, looks like there is some research to back up my teacher/learner experience in thinking that distributed exposure to the vocab (even HFW) could very well be more effective than massing the exposures in a targeted situation. This just in from the American Federation of Teachers:
Kristine Bloom and Thomas Shuell (1981) taught 20 new vocabulary words to high school students enrolled in a French course. Students either studied the words for one 30-minute session (massed) or for a 10-minute session on each of three consecutive days. The groups were indistinguishable on a test administered immediately after practice, with each group remembering about 16 of the 20 words. A retest administered four days later, however, showed that the distributed practice group still remembered the words (15 words correct), whereas the massed practice group forgot much more (11 words correct).
Another study was conducted by Cornelius Rea and Vito Modigliani (1985) with third-grade students. In this experiment, one group was taught spelling words and math facts in a distributed condition and another in a massed condition. A test immediately following the training showed superior performance for the distributed group (70 percent correct) compared to the massed group (53 percent correct). These results seem to show that the spacing effect applies to school-age children and to at least some types of materials that are typically taught in school.
– See more at: http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/summer-2002/ask-cognitive-scientist#sthash.WWms6r6n.dpuf