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Importance of Simplicity in the First Weeks
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17 thoughts on “Importance of Simplicity in the First Weeks”
Sooooooo true! Friday I was using CWB. I had a student playing basketball in the bathroom at Wal-Mart with another student and then I tried “At what time?” I lost all but maybe 2 students so I quit and moved on. My problem is I feel I have to make a story out of every student but now I see I don’t. Thank you for post!
So…I’m going to ask the stupid question. If the kids don’t know the word for “moon” or “bathroom” as in Erica’s example, do we say it in English? write it on the board in the TL and point to it? emphasize proper names? This is where I get caught up because I always afraid I’m adding in too much info and I will lose them.
Sorry! It’s my first day back (kids start next week) and I’m a little freaked out here!
Different teachers handle the issues differently, and some of us handle things differently depending on the circumstances. For me, the goal is to avoid [i]speaking[/i] English, so I write the necessary words with translation on the board. Where most of us (including me) go astray is in allowing too many new words to intrude so that our boards become a jungle of words in L2 and L1. Obviously as you begin you will have to do some writing, but do your best to limit it. This is where cognates and names become helpful. Instead of playing basketball at the mall (Einkaufszentrum in German), Joe might be playing basketball at Bella Terra (the name of a specific local mall).
As I introduce myself to my students, I pick the fact that I play organ (fortunately, “play” is the same for both sports and musical instruments in German), but I play organ in Aquarium of the Pacific (yes, in one of the tanks to keep the fish entertained – it becomes an enduring image). Sometimes we eventually lose the “of the Pacific” part and move the aquarium to the moon or some other place. Not only am I opening myself up to the students, I am modeling what I want from them – that combination of reality and fantasy. Other students will also place a mundane place like McDonald’s on the moon – in some classes we have quite a small town built on the moon or Venus or …
This is a huge question. The answer (this is just my opinion) lies in that comment – I can’t remember who wrote it but it was important – made a few days ago here about the 20 hours. How if you can get them up to that many hours of pure CI – that would be about a month and a half of classes – then you pass some kind of vocabulary checkpoint where they have enough words to make stories work and all. (This is another reason, I suspect, that waiting to do stories is a good idea.)
So I start class with Word Associations, right? (See TPRS Resources page of this site.) You saw me do those at Summit about 8 years ago, working off the Word Wall. Remember? So THAT is the stuff, those few words they learn at the beginning of each class, that forms their instant visible word bank for class. It may not be moon or bathroom, but it would be something else. But the point to make here, the real deal for me in my own CI world, is that I am not going to get up there like I used to and just bring in any old word. That is one of the deepest things I have come to appreciate in the past five years about this work. If they don’t know it don’t fricking use it, don’t allow ANY English (see how this has changed and Blaine was right all along?) and make them suggest cute answers from only words that they already know or can pull off the Word Wall.
When we circle with balls or whatever we circle with, books, hobbies, whatever, we then focus only on the key word we are using to talk about the kid’s sport, book or hobby. We don’t say a sentence or ask a question that does not have that word in it. This is so key. We just use the target we are working on. If it is CWB, then it is what the kid does. If it is OWI, that goes a little wide but we keep that image simple. If it is PQA, we make them use the words they know off the wall or from CWB or OWI or whatever, but we do not introduce new words and after the 20 hours we see most wonderfully that there is full or near full (an earful at least) comprehension by all the kids, or most of them, because we have limited our vocab so intensely in the first six weeks and once we get past those 20 hours that exponential curve kicks in, only because we waited.
THEN in that second month, because we have stayed in the TL with such discipline during the first month, we begin to experience what is so unique about this approach, when we have sheltered vocabulary sufficiently and gone full steam ahead all engines full out with grammar (defined here as correctly spoken language) – we experience that feeling of unexpected power like when a sailboat suddenly catches the wind it was trying for and we move forward at unexpected rates of speed. THAT is what we want, but we won’t have it if we fluck around with English.
Huge! Huge, huge, huge, huge, huge! Thanks to both of you for responding! I have to revamp what I’m thinking about for the first 6 weeks and totally make your replies my focus while getting to know kids. I already have my Susie Gross “just love and teach the kids” classic posts posted in my room; now I have to add these!
Ben, what words should one include on the word wall? Should they be different for different levels?
Nevermind. I found your word wall poster.
This reminds me of how Dave Talone and Charlotte took one structure and repeated/circled it nearly 200 times during our after session peer coaching times.
My goal this year will be to stay NARROW and DEEP and not go wide with extra vocabulary. I will also focus on SLOW.
Robert Allen did the same thing at iFLT. It was velvet for the last 45 minutes on one word. Each time I heard it, I loved it and it whispered to me:
“…hey, don’t worry about those other words, they’re just pretty faces. Just listen for me and I promise I will be back every sentence he is saying. Those other words are just Chinese words – you don’t have to worry about them. You know what they mean because of me, right? Yes. I am your special word. Just listen for me. He will say “drinks” in Chinese, and you know I sound like your word “her” so you can remember me by thinking of her drinking something every time you hear me and you will know what I mean. You are understanding what he is saying because he says me every now and again. I am the basis of your understanding. I am your word.. I am your friend. All you need to do is try to figure out what he is asking (follow that laser pointer!) and I will take care of the rest!…”.
That’s what I want my kids to experience, what I understood from Robert in the last hour of his work in San Diego. I really love that word “drinks” now because Robert had put away trying to shove too much knowledge in my noggin about Chinese and just said that one word in context slowly and gently enough so that I could understand. I don’t know how to spell it but I will want to learn that when it is time and when I read it it will wink up at me from the page and when I hear it and read it I will be happy. Because Robert said it in every sentence and I understood!
Yay, Ben! It’s a nice word. I have a question because I am thinking a lot about Chinese literacy. If you have thoughts, I would like to know. I have been talking with Chinese teachers. In some ways, though, I think that alphabet-language CI teachers might be more like a non-4%er new to Chinese, who doesn’t passionnately love Chinese (yet, let’s say), but who understands well how to acquire a language. So I think that you all have important input on this topic.
How would you prefer to read that word once the time comes?
1 phonetically (some letters will represent a different sound from English use of the letter)
2 characters (and just how much, if anything, do you want to learn about a character – mnemonics created in the class to remember it, and/or the meaning of components of it?)
3 both at once with phonetics shown above each character (and you decide which your focus your eyes and attention on at that time)
Thanks for any thoughts.
Hi Diane, I’m not Ben, but I was in Linda Li’s Chinese class at NTPRS this time, so I will throw in my 2c. She wrote all the words on the board in pinyin. Because of the complexity of the sounds, this was essential for me. I’m a logical learner, so seeing the words is how I survived. I knew from linguistics that the accent markers were really tones. Every time she said a word, I was letting it echo in my head to hear the tone and looking on the board to confirm whether I was hearing it right. She was surfing at the edge of my ability with her CI, but I understood 100%. By the end of the four hours, I was mostly hearing accurately, and when we did the reading (also in pinyin), my comprehension was instant; before she would say the 2nd word, I understood the sentence. So for someone like me, having that phonetic support was crucial. I think that during oral CI, trying to keep up with the Chinese characters would have been too much for me. So I personally would prefer reading and writing in actual chinese characters to be a separate piece. The characters are a large amount visual information that require special attention, different from the attention needed to understand the sounds. It might be different for artistic types. I knew a girl who was learning disabled and struggled to read silently or aloud in English, though she understood perfectly. She was into anime, and showed me some of her drawings. I marveled that she was doing japanese characters, and she said “Actually, it’s quite easy.” For her, it was a few simple lines. Go figure. I think the difference in sound between Chinese letters and letters in English is probably not so important. I mean, to learn any language, people have to cope with that, and it comes with time.
Hi Carla,
Thanks very much for your thoughts – it’s very helpful. I have been thinking about splitting up when I show (or at least focus on) pinyin and characters and your comments validate that. It’s like just take one thing at a time – first, the sound of the word with its meaning, later the sound/meaning to its appearance. Alphabet languages don’t have such a disparity between sound and written form but don’t people say this is a tricky part about French?
I’ve never taught pinyin by itself (this is a 4%er for Chinese, I am coming to believe) but I do not want kiddos never to learn to read real Chinese. Also, as you say, some people gravitate to the symbolic easily, and I have not wanted to take them from the experience of connecting meaning to characters right away. At the least, I’m not going to talk about the characters when I introduce new words (even though I may still show them for the sake of kids who get them faster). I will focus on sound and meaning in Step 1 & 2. For readings, though, I would like to make them character-based but without frustrating anyone. I think this means a good bit of choral reading/read-alouds before I ask the kids to read on their own. Probably with new words shown before the reading with pinyin above. I had a textbook that always showed pinyin near characters, but not directly above – it absolutely has been a disaster for the reading ability of 5 boys in the class I used that book with 2 years ago. They read very poorly, but generally their listening comprehension is good. Perhaps it’s a phase and they just needed more time than any students I’ve taught before. They also give push-back about reading (“I don’t like to read” whiny comments).
Terry Waltz has some interesting approaches to these things. She shows only pinyin for new words, and then creates very thorough, repetitive, yet real story-like readings using no pinyin. She starts reading aloud and the kids can join in – she says it’s usually the second or third line that they can because the reading has been so well crafted to the vocab that they’ve mastered orally. Oral work for several hours, then reading something simpler than they can hear & understand. The thing is I don’t think I have time to craft such careful stuff. I have 5 sections and I need to have time in the evening without school dominating all my time.
Tamula, a Chinese teacher here in the PLC, does reading and writing with her students using pinyin first, then characters in readings. I think my students would be antsy going over anything twice based on experience with them. A parallel version in characters might work for them.
It’s a big deal for Chinese teachers, this topic!
“Of course, you refuse boring answers. Once the skateboarding kid is on the moon boarding with Justin Bieber, you leave that kid doing that activity and go to the next kid. ”
This is an interesting statement. I have found that when I have started off class demanding the silly/strange, the class inherently got desensitized to the silly/strange as the year went on.
Instead, I allow for the normal answers at first. I allow that because while we are learning how to play the game, they might do something with a family member or with someone else. I think those words are just as valuable and while not as fun as playing basketball with Michael Jordan on the Space Jam planet or something, the kids are being told that this is important. Later we can make it silly. But I try to convey even from this moment that whatever they say, we will tell them it is interesting.
For me, this has been better, because then later we can build off the silly/strange and it remains novel, while we started off moreso with compelling input about the kids themselves as well as the occasional silly one!
Just my thoughts though. I know we all have different experiences.
-Jeremy
Hmmm… That’s a good point, Jeremy. And I think you might be right. I’ve always gone for the strangest, most extreme details beginning on day 1, with a lot of success but now that I think about it it does kind of wear off after the first 9 weeks. And my experience has been that it’s a very bad thing to run out of steam. When the silly, novel answers run out of steam, the students who still were into the game, would take things to extremes that can get you in trouble. Been there, done that.
And if they don’t get into the mundane as interesting I play the Annoying Orange card:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/10/29/lame-students/
I’m flattered that my name was used in the example for the lame kid. Quite ironic considering my comment on this page. Haha. 😉
As the year goes, I always tell the kids if they don’t know what to answer (because they feel pressured by the class to be funny/interesting), I tell them when I ask they can shrug their shoulders and that opens it up to the class.
In this way, I am encouraging them to not worry about the answer if they don’t think it will be interesting. And it puts it on the class’s shoulders anyway!
I don’t remember if I got this idea from your books or where I got it from. But it’s worked for me and for my “lame” kids.
This makes me think about those kids who fall into the bAPI idea about how exposed some kids feel in class, how fearful they are and usually for real reasons described in that article by Bob Patrick.
I really like to avoid zeroing in on a kid for an answer, preferring to throw the question out into the air and see who catches it.