Diane shares:
Here’s what I’ve done with reading as it’s developing this school year:
– 3 Steps from Establish Meaning to massive aural input to reading stuff created in class with the students (or sometimes written by me, but highly linked to previous class discussion).
– In addition, about once a month or at most once every 2 weeks, we read a part of a book written by someone else as a capstone. First time we read a really beginning-level book in Chinese 1 (full of illustrations and big, big font) we made it a party day and kids brought food.
So I am working backwards from novels, but I’m using them more as a break for me from needing to prepare more reading every so often, and a chance to view the same words and phrases in a new context for the students. I can see how it could dominate the direction of class if one lets it (and how that would hinder things) but I think having our own reading as the majority is going pretty well.
I responded:
What you say there Diane is exactly what I recommend for those who see this as a job and not as an all-consuming life experience. It’s the only way that makes sense to me. Unless we like to backward plan. Again, the key point in reading novels has been exposed – we read ultra simple novels as an adjunct to our auditory instruction in our CI classes.
If we hand our students anything that cannot be processed effortlessly, then we are going against the effortless piece, which is the big piece of CI and yet a piece that many of us conveniently forget, perhaps because we can’t shake our own training in education, that it all has to be complicated.
When are we going to get the relaxation piece in this work? We probably never will. We will always make it more complicated than it needs to be. Only our students who become language teachers will do it in the way we ourselves can’t, by totally relaxing and letting the language happen. We are more slaves to our own past training as teachers than we think. Bless our tired hearts.