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cRD – 14
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12 thoughts on “cRD – 14”
I don’t know why the difference between R&D and Reading Option A is so difficult for me to understand.
Here is Reading Option A (for stories): https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/03/24/reading-option-a-latest-update-2013/
And now with cRD (for novels) we are talking about snowplowing through boring parts and then getting deep reps on short sections that lend themselves to RT, PSA, etc.
I guess when I read over both the methods, “Reading Option A” sounds more like “Read and Discuss” to me because there is such an emphasis on discussing the text in both L1 (for grammar) and L2 (for reps and personalization). cRD seems more like a method specialized for novels which combines discussion (PQA/PSA) with other methods (TPR, RT).
I dunno, maybe I’m just parsing stuff too much. I want to get into templates for these things, but when I made the first draft of the R&D template I think I was describing Reading Option A–probably because I mistook Reading Option A for R&D because it felt so much like… reading and discussing. There I go parsing stuff to death.
Maybe in my own mind I like the distinction between “reading strategies for novels” and “reading strategies for stories.”
But then again in both cRD and Reading Option A we follow the same basic process of translate, PQA/PSA, RT (if time in Reading Option A), TPR, discuss grammar in L2 (would we do this in cRD?), etc. I am just trying to imagine a template that lays this all out. It almost feels like I’d be making the same template twice but on the one called cRD it would have “snowplow through boring stuff” as step 1 and then everything else would be the same as Reading Option A.
Ahh! Okay. I’m losing it now. I gotta get home but hopefully that made sense.
James what you say makes a lot of sense. They are very similar. Maybe since I am the person who made up ROA – hah hah just thought I’d throw out one more anagram out there – I am in a different space with it.
ROA has been so helpful to me you have no idea, and to me it is very different qualitatively from R & D even although it really isn’t. Whenever I get observed and I want to do Step 3 for the observation (like I did for Krashen one time and the machine wouldn’t work!), I just have that description in front of me and I follow it and feel 100% more serene during the class.
Here is the guts of ROA:
*5. Choral translation using laser pointer.
*6. Discussion of text in L2.
*7. Discussion of grammar in L1 (3 and 4 may interweave)
Here is the guts of R & D:
1. Translate
2. Discuss text in L2
3. Discuss grammar in L1
So don’t think you are overparsing. You’re not. The difference for me is not so much in the process but in the feel of it. It really feels different when I can reach out with my hand and almost grab a word and talk about it and look at it with the kids and so the grammar piece becomes really a bigger part of it in ROA. Grammar is much bigger in ROA.
The big mistake I made for years with R & D was to just go spinning off in L2 to discuss the text so much that the actual reading process became secondary to the discussion of the text in the TL. Some years, because of that tendency to talk too much in the TL, I read for maybe 20% of the time when my ideal amount of reading in any year would be 60%.
Another difference in feel is that the kids, having made up the story, are much closer to it. When you embed words into it (I don’t do much of that and should do more, at least for a few rounds of expanding/embedding – see category), you own it more as a class.
Plus, in ROA, there is much more option for dictee and tech stuff like Textivate.
So it is more a qualitative difference, James. So thus hard to quantify. The bottom line is you are completely right. But for me in my own mind, there is a huge difference, probably because of all the years I’ve been doing both.
Oh! Maybe another big difference: At the end of Reading Option A a Quick Quiz over anything in the reading is in order.
But we wouldn’t give a Quick Quiz over what was snowplowed during cRD, would we? The Quick Quiz would need to be over the “focus section” that had all the supporting activities, right?
I was searching on reading activities and I found this. To me ROA is Ben Slavic and R & D is Blaine Ray? I’m a newbie so I could be far off.
I prefer shortened ROA because it takes my kids 30-40 minutes to read the story we made up and they stay with me. If I go much over 30 minutes on translate, discuss, grammar, they start to moan and groan. In fact, translate, grammar is usually where it ends up. I’ll ask a few questions in the discussion because I know I’m supposed to. Then I read their faces and know I have to move on.
This late in the year, we don’t even do the stories anymore, I just make them up on paper and we read and discuss together. I’m not even doing TPRS anymore, just R. So this is very important to me right now.
Yeah creating stories falls flat for me at the end of the year. Or at least it is this year and did last year, too. We read a lot from Feb/Mar through the end of the year.
Thanks James, I feel better now. Overall, I learned a lot in my first year of using TPRS.
Same with me. I’m reading now. I sit down with the book, ask what page we are on, put my feet up on a desk next to me, and start R and D. Pay me more and have an observer walk in and I may get up and do stories*, but they really do lose their energy for me by the end of the winter. It’s like the way they force feed geese in France to make pâté de foie gras. Too much is not good. I believe in making them want stories and as I said here a few days ago level 2 should be mainly a reading year with them begging for stories as breaks. Otherwise they don’t appreciate the stories.
*the kids know to “go with it” if I put the book down and instantly write just one verb – whatever comes into my mind – on the board and start PQAing it. They know to go into “dog and pony show” mode. Sitting there reading with them doesn’t get all the boxes checked. I vote for R and D as the true panacea for the “exhausted students/low salary” blues.
To add to the above – let’s say you want to switch gears if an observer walks in and you aren’t happy with what you are doing in that moment when you get walked in on, just grab one verb out of the air and start to PQA it. That might seem intimidating to newer people but, if you think about it, it is really easy. By asking “who” and “where”, just those two questions, you immediately personalize and lighten up the mood. When it becomes clear that the great grandmother of your student William skates on buses in Chicago, the kids are hooked. You can even bring up an actor to test how long that image can go. The uneducated observer would just sit there and wonder why they aren’t writing or conjugating verbs, and then that would be your opportunity teach them how output emerges from lots of listening and reading, and so you could help them in that way to becoming a more aware administrator, and not a dumb ass.
Last question…how long do your students stay focused on R & D? I have 90 minute blocks. jGR is not an option at my school. So it’s not like I can grade them for paying attention.
I’m like you. I can get a good 30-45 minutes on R&D if I give a brain-break half-way through. After that they need to do something on their own or in groups with what we just read or on something like what we just read.
…or, better yet?, after 30-45 minutes of R&D we can switch to a picture or movie and discuss/write about/whatever it.
One thing you can do with R and D is a parallel story. If you are reading that Anne wants to go to Mexico you can personalize the structure “wants to go to Mexico” by asking if any of your students want to go to Mexico. You can actually do a story from one question like that, a story that parallels the action in the text and thus provides you with a ready made and strong vocabulary base.
A lot of teachers, however, don’t realize that they don’t have to do an entire story but can just take one question about one of the kids in the classroom that parallels something you just read in the book and ask it quickly and get back to the R and D. Parallel questioning can be very short and to the point. I think that there may be some articles in the “Parallel Novels” category here on that topic.
So R and D, just to be clear, includes doing PQA with the kids as part of the D and not just “discussing the text” about the facts being read. Then, as long as the parallell discussion using structures from the text has energy, you can stay with it. It’s a way of extending R and D further, which addresses your question.