Linda Li Observation

Today I’m in here observing Linda Li in one of her afternoon classes. I’ll take some notes to share:

1. In the first minute of class she packed about 20 sentences in. They were all spoken very fast. Very high paced. There was no effort to shelter that I could see and there was no deliberate effort to go slowly. She didn’t need to.
2. That first minute wasn’t submersion, but immersion because these 7th grade second year Mandarin students are visibly understanding everything. It proves the point we are always making that if we work to communicate they will be able to communicate (what we could call the Eric Herman Principle).
3. Heavy use of posters and laser pointer. She has 55 posters up and uses them all the time to clarify.
4. Those posters are what she attributes her students’ heavy speech output to. Whenever I ask her how it is that her kids speak so much (unbelievable) she always says it is because the kids are constantly interacting with those posters. It is accurate to say that the speech output I am seeing in here is a direct result of deep, interesting, large amounts of input in Mandarin.
5. The lesson today is to have a general discussion about a trip that the kids took with the school last week up into the foothills of the Himalyas, near Rishikesh on the Ganges. So the first thing she does to get the conversation going, what we all do, is  establish meaning of the structures needed to be able to communicate about the trip.
6. To do that she puts up a lot of slides with definitions in pinyin and real Chinese characters and English versions of words like mountains, rivers, family, teachers, friends, classmates, ride a plane, ride a train, ride a car, ride a travel bus.
7. She reminds the kids to let her know with the fist stop sign if they don’t understand. She makes ample use of “What did I just say”.
8. The thing I’m having trouble with is the speed of her speech. I know it’s a second year class, but the speed is so fast! So much for SLOW in this classroom. I can only conclude that it is because she went sufficiently slow with them last year in level 1 so that they can process easily at this speed, because they all can (it’s a small class of 8 students). I am seeing the result of vast quantities of input over the past year and one third.
9. So she conducts the lesson by looking at one of the slides, and then just winging it. For example, the expressions ride a train and ride a car are up there now. She asks questions about how many kids rode a train to get to Hardwar (they all did, being on the same trip). Then she asked which was more comfortable, the train or the bus (they said the bus). Then she put up the next slide with: two hours, three hours, half a day, one day, for a long time. That is five targets. She didn’t seem fazed by the quantity of targets – she just started using them, asking how long the kids were in the cars. This use of ppt slides (no images, just information) to run a class is something that really works. Stories,  Video and Discuss/MT, all those other things we do are great, but just having a bit of meaning established on a slide allows us to go anywhere with them in our classes as long as we have the basic questioning techniques down (each question must have a projected target in it.)
10. Now, she quickly leaves those questions related to how long they traveled for a new slide with: is hot, is humid, is cold, is sunny, is rainy, is windy, is foggy. She moves the discussion over to the poster she has about time of day and starts crafting (again, very quickly crafted sentences, faster than I have ever seen Linda speak but that, again, is certainly because these kids have been with her for 1.3 years). She asks questions about the weather was at what time of day along the Ganges.
11. Next, the new slide has trees, rivers, mountains, rocks, stars, elephants, monkeys. By having the PPT right there with each new slide loaded with words she is using, she has given herself the option of taking any question in any direction she wants, with any kid, which is, in fact, commuication. She is teaching to communicate ideas. She is not teaching the language. She is not teaching a unit. She is not teaching something in a box or flattened out on a piece of paper. She is teaching to communicate ideas. She genuinely wants to know what the kids tell her.
12. Now it’s about 35 min. into the class. She has a slide up now with Indian food, American food, Chinese food, Italian food. She asks a few questions about what kind of food the kids ate on the trip.
13. Next slide has water rafting, zip lining, washing the elephants, hiking, read books. She starts asking about what they did in the camp. She has them speak out what they did.
14. Some just produce huge sentences!
15. The sentences are unique in that even with my untrained ear I can hear that kind of weird authentic grunting pronunciation from these kids who are not Chinese. It makes me think that, if you just listen long enough, authentic sounding speech will come out. Authentic speech in leads to authentic speech out.
16. At the top of each slide, above the vocabulary, was one question she wanted to ask in this interview process. (The class is almost like a Star of the Week interview class but the process is reversed in that she is interviewing the entire) class.
17. Now I am listening to a girl form a sentence. Slowly, as one would expect, but clearly the words she is using are emerging in a kind of flow from her deeper mind. It’s so obvious. She is not thinking. Rather, she is waiting for the next sound to percolate up to her mind where she can use it. That is one dramatic example of how speech always emerges from the unconscious mind and is not something that can be “thought about” to be produced.
18. At one point, Linda said a sentence and repeated it four times, with the kids standing. She had each kid sit down when they understood the sentence. By the end of the fourth repetition of the sentence they were all seated except for one girl. The class at that point started good naturedly singing a song that Linda had taught them called, “Sorry My Chinese is Not Good” (YouTube). But they spontaneously changed the lyrics, singing to Linda, “Sorry, her Chinese is not good.” All had a good laugh, including the girl. Processing this at the end of class, Linda told me that it is those little unexpected things like that example that occur in class that make her want to teach.
19. 50 min. into this class interview thing, Linda had them go to the tables around the edge of the room where she told them to write out their answers to the same questions just discussed. They write on regular paper while looking at the questions. The discussion is fresh in their minds.
20. A very interesting thing is that under each question are the structures that the kids will need to answer the question. So they are writing from a question, given possible answers, not unlike in vPQA, and I see them looking a the walls all the time as they respond. They are pulling random information from the 55 posters to help them write properly. So one thing we can say is that Linda’s CI classes have a ton of speech and writing output in them. She says it’s also to save her voice that she does so much writing.
21. Feel of the class – she’s just having fun. That becomes the class culture as the kids perfectly mirror her sense of fun. Sounds kind of California to say that, but it’s a core beam in the structure of any CI building. Really, this is just fun scaffolding. Linda spent the first 50 min. of class in a very fast pace, happy discussion answering the questions that were on all the slides. This produced speech that varied from one word answers to elaborate sentences. Then, instead of saying it (first half of class), the kids wrote it (second half of class).
22. I have never given half a block class of about 45 min. to just having the kids write. The kids used the walls for information. Linda walked around and answered questions.
23. So how does Linda, so adept at CI, end up seeing so much output from her students? She just told me as she walked by, “I am convinced that the reason these kids can speak and write like this is because of all the input over the past year in level 1 and now up to this point in level 2. I NEVER make level 1 kids speak or write. It’s all input at level 1”.