Still reading about cRD? Then you are a marine. A CI Commando. Let’s make hats for San Diego. With CI Commando on them.
So, among other things, in this more compact version of R & D:
1. I go slower. OK, that’s not new but I gotta say it and do it anyway. Gotta the walk the walk on SLOW.
2. The students need more time in quietude to read the passage before we translate it. In the old way, I would tell them to read the passage for ten minutes and then we would translate up to two pages all at once and that was just too much. I personally need to learn to cover much less text in class with my students. If I did this properly I would theoretically never need stories or anything else to get great language gains in my students – I could get them just from this new version of R & D alone. Narrow and deep, say it again. Narrow and deep, make it a chant.
So now what I do is make the entire class about no more than five lines of the text they read to start class, snowplowing through most of the text. In this new compact R & D, we would normally not even read a full paragraph – we would spend the entire class on about three or four verbs, and they would be the rebar for the entire class and nothing more. Just three or four verbs.
So they read it quietly and we then translate it – all of that can be done in five minutes to start class, and then – here is where the heavy lifting begins – we move into massive CI using three strategies we already use, but only on those three verbs. What are the three strategies? TPR, Readers Theatre and PSA.
Limiting the amount of text I cover and using those three existing CI strategies in my new version of R & D has the astounding result of raising reps from 50 to well over 200 in a class, reflecting and putting into practice Sabrina’s Great Insight – so new to us – that we need FAR more reps than we have hitherto thought for a structure to be acquired.