I will be presenting two three hour sessions in Las Vegas. I ask the group’s help in proofreading my notes for inclusion in the conference program. Luckily, I am limited to two pages. Merci d’avance for rendering this service. The first topic I will be addressing is Moving from PQA into a Story:
Moving From PQA into a Story
We take the three structures presented in the story script we are using and we PQA them for reps and to personalize them so that they are interesting to the kids. We sometimes have fun just doing the PQA and never arrive at the story. That is fine. Sometimes, we feel the story calling us and we curtail the PQA. There is no set way.
I ask three students to count how many times I say each of the three structures. Those students are called PQA counters. In the same way that the story writer, the quiz writer and the artist serve to further the story, PQA counters further the PQA. Just the fact that they are sitting there counting reps has an effect on the quality of what is going on in the room.
I try to remember that the structures are the real target of the story. My success depends on remembering that one thing. I remember that the story is merely a delivery device for the structures, and not vice versa, and so I make sure that at least one target structure is included in each thing I say.
When I do the PQA, I always try to remember to take the first bit of information from a student that lends itself to being bent into something weird and I go with it. If I myself try to bend the information into something weird, it is not funny. That takes a lot of pressure off of me.
My job in PQA, therefore, is to get the reps and to do the personalization work via the circled questions and to be aware when it is time to jump into the script.
I indicate to my students that the PQA is over and that a story is starting by a) erasing the board of anything written on the board up to that point, and by b) standing up an actor. Those two things signal to the class that a story is starting.
To repeat, once we have reached the point where something weird or meaningful has happened about a certain student in the PQA, we know that it is time bail out of the PQA and start the story. If the kids are doing their job of supplying cute answers, and if I am doing my job of circling creative questions, that moment is fairly easy to notice.
I used to think that I could just create a story from an interesting image or an idea that came up during the PQA, eschewing the actual written story script. I thought a good PQA session had enough power to create a story on its own, with no scripts.
But now I have tempered that enthusiasm. Story scripts like those written by Anne Matava are, in my opinion, de rigueur. We need the scripts. General PQA is just fine, but once we begin working with specific target structures that are connected to a specific story script, we need to use that story.
To explain this further using an analogy, a rebar (short for reinforcing bar) is a steel bar used in reinforced concrete structures to hold the concrete together. In that way, three rebar rods in a piece of concrete would be like the three structures we use to hold stories together.
Now, we could use cheap rebar – insufficiently repeated structures before moving into the story – or we could use carbon based or even cast iron rebar – heavily repeated, highly personalized structures presented for a long time before the story is begun.
I know that if I repeat each structure over 100 times on Monday in interesting and meaningful, perhaps even compelling, ways, then the story will be, as it were, made of tempered, fired, very strong steel. Monday POA, the way I do it personally, leads to two days of a story on T/W.
I have seen this over and over since I started with this twelve years ago. Not only are the stories stronger when we get the high quality carbon rebar (lots of reps on the structures), but also I have definitely noticed that kids absent on Monday are pretty much out of it on Tuesday.
The fewer the new words (the rocks in the concrete that the rebar/structures are holding together), and the more the focus of the PQA is on the structures, the easier will it be for our students to be able to focus on the meaning of the story.
We focus on the building and not on the rocks that make it up, and we need the rebar to be strong so that the building/story can be strong.
This is in keeping with what Dr. Krashen says is the way we learn languages – the process should be largely and effortless, fully unconscious process that focuses on the message and not on the medium for its delivery. All that is required is that the language be presented in a way that the learner not feel anxious and that the content be interesting, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/07/18/we-learn-languages-unconsciously-1/
The output will come later. It is absolutely true that we learn languages by absorbing them unconsciously first – without analysis – over years. It is folly to force output too early, and if you plan on doing that in your own classroom then you are attending the wrong conference.
We must continue in our CI instruction to put our students’ auditory and reading focus on the forest and not on the individual trees – that should be our principal interest as teachers who use comprehension based instruction.
Comprehensible input is a natural process. The conscious decoding of individual words is not necessary – in fact it works against everything. The meaning of the individual words can only become clear within a context of chunks of sound, not of individual words. The beauty is in the larger thing, the grove, the forest, the building, the story, its meaning.
The target structures, the rebar rods, thus play a role of supreme importance in comprehension based instruction. They create a situation in which the power of the deeper mind is allowed to decode the message without pathetic interference from the conscious mind.
In one class period the mind could not decode fifty target structures, rebar rods, any more than the concrete on one floor of a building could hold fifty rebar rods – they would overload the structure in the same way that too many target structures would overload the power of the mind to decode all that sound into meaning.