I’m just synthesizing some ideas presented in comments earlier today. My goal is not to label what is wrong but find out how we can better serve ELA kids with stories, if we can, and I think we can. So here is what I have taken away from today’s discussion:
Bridging the ELA/TPRS Gap
By doing TPRS stories with kids whose needs are not being met as you describe above, we could use the stories in the following way:
1. Since the kids make up the story, they will feel less forced to speak, as they are now, about topics that don’t interest them. Not being forced to speak is at the core of all that we do. We give the brain the time it needs to form the language for real. So the personalization piece right there could diminish the angst in class that these ELA kids currently feel, which would be a good first step.
2. We could spend a very limited amount of class time on creating stories. In our FL classrooms, we sometimes spend days creating stories, and laughing all the way. But if we created a story, one created by the ELA kids, in, say, fifteen minutes, we could then turn the hammer on to the TPRS Step 3 activity of Reading. But this time the kids would be reading about something they created. Ownership is a powerful tool in education. This is a point of critical importance. By getting the buy-in that is missing in their ELA classes where they are forced to read about historical events and stories that just don’t interest them, they would develop a different attitude toward what they could do as language learners. It would shift the fulcrum to their side of things.
3. So to spend maybe 10% of a story on its creation, and then spend 50% of the time on doing some embedded reading work with it – we could consult with Laurie and Michele on this – we could then spring from the reading into distributing the remaining 40% of the time on writing. We could do dictation as per the model first presented here years ago. We could do lots of free writes (probably the best option that we have to use on developing writing) and we could do some of Bob Patrick’s OWATS idea to get some group work in and further build community while teaching writing.
Judy Dubois had a great idea that addresses the lack of a common language problem. She explains:
I’d like to speak up about the problem of “no shared language”, which IMHO is no longer a problem. I gave a presentation at a private school here in France which teaches French to students from around the globe. There were Koreans, Brazilians, Chinese, Germans, Swiss, Norwegians and Japanese all in the same class. I was told “We can’t translate for meaning because we have so many different nationalities in every class.” Yet, as the teacher wrote vocabulary on the board and began miming and gesturing, half of the students had their phones out and were looking the meaning up in their native language. When the teacher saw them, she scolded them and told them to put their phones away, but they were out again within 5 minutes. Personally, I think the students had the right idea. Since almost everyone has access to on-line dictionaries, why not use them? With the right guidelines to avoid confusion when words may have more than one meaning, I don’t think that there’s that much difference between ELA and other languages. Most of the ambiguities will sort themselves out during PQA.
So maybe we can bridge the gap by including the kids more in community, giving them a place in the community that is not shaming to them, let them create a story but focus less on the auditory creation of the story and more on the reading and writing piece, and allow them to establish meaning via online dictionaries between their first language and the one being studied.
Another idea that might bridge the gap is about reading in the ELA classroom and what we have learned in TPRS classrooms about it that may help them. The more challenging a text is, the more it draws into play the conscious mind. But when they read in such a way that it all unfolds in their unconscious mind, the more it draws into play their unconscious arsenal, developed from hearing speech. The nature of comprehensible input is that it occurs below the level of awareness, and that goes for reading too. Susan Gross says a reading should unfold like a movie in their minds just like it happens with stories. So if we ask ELA kids to “read down” they will read more and it will all become more comprehensible faster. I don’t think ELA classrooms do this.
So far this bridge of good ideas from the TPRS world to the ELA world includes:
1. Stories build personalization. Personalization builds community. Being included in a classroom community builds confidence. Inclusion reduces isolation and shaming.
2. Stories can be minimized in terms of auditory input to create lots of time for reading of the stories, and esp. embedded reading. TPRS Step 3 can reign in an ELA classroom, but the first two steps would set that all up.
3. Stories that lead to lots of reading can lead to lots of writing. Writing could be like a fourth step in an ELA program based on TPRS.
4. Cell phones and online dictionaries can solve the problem of multi-languages in one classroom. The child need only look up the word in his own language dictionary.
5. Students constantly “read down” to use Michele’s term. This produces more reading, and in an ELA classroom there is nothing more valuable than more reading.
(à suivre)