Hey Ben,
I have been teaching teenagers French for the past 15 years. I am the only French teacher at one of the two middle and high schools in Pittsfield, MA. I teach one class at Reid Middle School and fours classes at Taconic High School. Although this has its disadvantages, it has also been a blessing to me, since I basically get free reign with curriculum and method. (Plus, foreign language study is considered quite frivolous in this district, so I fly way under the administrative radar. I work in an ignorant district, but have a fabulously intelligent and supportive department head.) For the past 12 or so years, each day I teach one French 1 class to eighth graders at the middle school, then four classes at the high school: French 1, 2, 3, and 4/5 (all grades mixed).
I started teaching French the way I learned it, by the book with tons of grammar drills. I was incredibly frustrated because it just wouldn’t work – it wasn’t interesting, the kids didn’t care, they acted out… Then my local county-wide FL organization sprang for a one-day workshop with Susan Gross, and my life started to change. Everything she said made so much intuitive sense. I started playing around with TPRS, and immediately saw the value in the way it reached the kids. I did a lot of research and tinkered for a couple of years until I completely abandoned the book and threw myself wholeheartedly into comprehensible input. Your blog has been the primary source of inspiration and training for me for the past several years; I can’t thank you enough, Ben.
I now focus my classes on acquiring key expressions from mini-novels through PQA and stories (which takes several weeks), then plowing through those novels. We have a song-of-the-week that we listen to daily to acquire whatever new vocabulary they may be interested in and to practice pronunciation. (On Fridays we watch the music video and vote on the song for our own “hit parade”.) I have been struggling with teaching culture, but I’m trying to work that out. (I am constantly tweaking.)
My biggest challenge right now is keeping my upper-level classes engaged with PQA and stories. A lot of the key expressions I feel I need to pull from novels are not very conducive to massive repetition through PQA, and the kids are bored with the routine of story-asking.
(For various personal reasons, I’ve fallen behind on my research and blog reading. I seem to remember that there is a blog member who is very proficient at working with upper levels, so I’ll be looking more into that.)
That’s basically where I am right now. I don’t know what I would do without this blog community – thank you all!