First Class – 9 – Example of Denver Public Schools

4 thoughts on “First Class – 9 – Example of Denver Public Schools”

1. Judy Dubois

   August 5, 2015 at 12:14 pm

   In France Stephanie Benson has created a new kind of reader for language students. She is British but has been living in France and writing detective novels in French for many years. Her books begin in French. The hero is young and French and going to an English speaking country. Often he /she is not a good student and dislikes having to speak another language. Basically Stephanie is describing a child in an immersion experience. He hears English words and they become comprehensible because of context or someone translates or explains. Little by little the child’s vocabulary expands and more and more of the book is written in English, until by the end of the book everything is in English. I gave one to a young reader and he reported:
   “J’ai trouvé que c’était un bon livre car au bout d’un moment on lit l’anglais sans s’en rendre compte. Le livre est simple et les mots aussi, ce qui facilite la lecture.” The series is called Tip Tongue.

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2. Ben Slavic

   August 5, 2015 at 12:36 pm

   That sentence translated means, “I found it a good book because after awhile one is reading English without really being aware of it. The book and the words are simple, also, which makes reading it easier.”
   It’s all about making instruction effortless, in my opinion, and Benson’s book seems to fill that bill. Judy does that book exist yet in other languages?

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   1. Robert Harrell

      August 5, 2015 at 8:06 pm

      I was at Stephanie Benson’s presentation in Agen, and it was excellent. She is working with the university in Bordeaux, so the target audience is native French speakers. So far the only books available are French to English, but they are preparing French to Spanish and French to German for publication within the next year or so. They also make a great deal of material available on a website – all free whether you buy the book or not.
      The basic idea is to place the main character into a setting in which he or she must learn the target language in order to accomplish a goal. The guide for inclusion was what words and phrases someone in the particular cross-cultural setting would need first rather than strictly adhering to a list of highest frequency words. For example, in one of the books the main character is at a hotel in Scotland having breakfast, so the names of many of the foods are included, even if “haggis” isn’t particularly high frequency in English.
      Stephanie Benson is also a writer of crime fiction / mysteries, and many of the books in the series are in the same genre. The story is inherently interesting, which is extremely beneficial, and starting in the native language helps a lot with getting the reader engaged in the story.
      I believe that the books could be strengthened by a more deliberate and conscious emphasis on repetition, but repetition is stylistically avoided in French, so that presents a cultural dissonance. Obviously, the French (for French native speakers) doesn’t need a lot of repetition, but there could have been more repetition of the English. Nonetheless, I definitely think the format is worth exploring, and books using this format could certainly help language learners move into the target language with less effort.

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      1. Eric Herman

         August 7, 2015 at 12:41 pm

         They’re called “diglot readers.” This strategy was invented by Robbins Burling (1968).
         http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/98107/j.1467-1770.1987.tb00390.x.pdf?sequence=1

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