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Mark Knowles
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CI and the Research (cont.)
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40 thoughts on “Mark Knowles”
There seem to be quite a few people out there who define “comprehensible” by what the teacher understands and not by what the student is able to understand. This, as I remarked in my report on the TESOL conference in Paris, gives the impression that the teacher “talks until he drops” and students never start speaking. When we talk about TPRS and comprehensible input, it’s important to insist on the fact that ideally students should be able to understand 100% of what the teacher says. Of course, it’ll always be less than that, because things are never as transparent as we think they are, but that should be our goal. In the demonstration I did with Croatian, I used “Rolls Royce” as a transparent word, but one man from Saudi Arabia didn’t understand it until we explained that it was a car. I think that sometimes we students don’t understand because we don’t expect to understand. So we hear a familiar word but fail to recognize it when it’s mixed in with a new language.
Having just attended ACTFL, I was encouraged to see the responses to all of the CI offerings. From what I saw, Carol Gaab’s TPRS Publishing booth was getting a lot of action as well as the demonstration station that manned by two masters of CI – Jason Fritze and Annick Chen – who drew crowds as they taught French and Mandarin on the hour. I think we have not yet reached critical mass but we may be getting closer to the tipping point. I did not get to hear Bill Van Patten but I hear he was very strong on CI and the elimination of direct grammar instruction. A few of us were able to attend an ACTFL roundtable. Researchers Richard Donato and Judith Liskin-Gasparro were soliciting ideas for research leading to best practices for L2 student teachers. They said all of the right things – comprehensible input, inductive grammar, limited vocabulary. I think we are making headway at the secondary level. If we could get some support from the universities, we’d be closer to the day were teaching with TPRS or CI is the norm.
I definitely hear what you are saying about support from the universities. I must say that we at the universities tend not to look at the ethical issues that I mentioned in my bio. How many people come crashing down when they take biochemistry in the hopes of getting into med school? Does the bio chemistry/medical school industrial complex really mind that that happens? This is known as selection, or screening. The same mechanism is in place in our language departments. If all the 2000 or so Freshmen taking Spanish actually succeeded in Spanish (as I in my idealistic mind believe they should), could you imagine the chaos that might create in our Spanish departments? That is even the case in some of the smaller departments where “quality over quantity” is the watchword, and where the summa cum laude are those who master the language but more especially the literary canon. Our institutions of higher learning are not necessarily designed to educate the masses for language proficiency, and for that to come about, some type of educational revolution will need to occur. My New Year’s prediction is that it will not happen in 2013, but if it does come about, I suspect some form of TPRS with an eye towards polysaturated CI will be a reference method.
Mark,
What exactly was the method being used? What was it billed as? Was the teacher “using” TPRS?
skip
The method was not TPRS. No, it was a content-based communicative approach. I don’t know if the teacher has a more precise name for the method, but that is how I would describe it. But it was definitely not TPRS.
This is the second time in a week that I have heard “content-based communicative approach.” I have been having a discussion with a U-Maine French teacher and she dissed the “content-based communicative approach.”
What is it? What does “content-based communicative approach” mean? What does it look like?
Thanks
skip
In this case, the lesson was on the numbers 1 through 6. Certainly there was an overt goal of simply learning those numbers in the L2 for the sake of learning those numbers in the L2, as well as the goal to learn their representations in the L2 written code. After that, “higher order thinking skills” were called upon with some math problems involving those first six numbers. At least, that’s what I believe was happening in the two worksheets handed out in the small group activities. I was lost by that point. All in all, it’s an improvement over the Audio Lingual Method and it throws a bone to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains. But was it lacking that certain je ne sais quoi that turns the crank of a really good language class? Sadly, for me at least, the answer is ‘yes.’
Mark,
Thank you for your bio and welcome! What an interesting read.
I too, like Skip wonder about what method you were being tested on.
I m being nosy here but what language do you teach and what language did you experiment with on Rosetta Stone?
I want to thank you for exploring/expanding the notion of comprehensible input versus comprehended input. You made me realize that too often we ( I should really say I b/c I can only speak for myself here) assume that what looks/feels/is perceived by us as comprehended by our students is in fact only comprehended by a few, annulling its comprehensibility ( I hope this word exists otherwise I just made it up). Yes, I agree with you that any meaning is always negotiable.
On a different note, I am very envious that you got to be the student of such great people as Bill Van Patten and Sandra Savignon. When I wrote my research paper for my Masters, I read a lot of their published articles and thought they were very bright and interesting people.
I too was in Breckenridge but b/c it was my first conference, I didn’t know too many people so if I saw you today I may recognize you but right now I can’t put a face to your name, and to a few other names on this blog for that matter. I m sorry about that. Hopefully there will be other occasions to meet each other in person.
Again, thank you for bringing to light something that I was not thinking about in my daily practice. In French we call that ” une remise en question” , and I am not sure how to translate this into english.
Looking forward to your contribution on this blog!
Hi Sabrina,
Sometimes I am terrible making the name/face correlation, so I may have met you at Breck, as well, but cannot put 1 and 1 together. I am trained in French, so that answers one of your questions, and also that “une remise en question” I believe might be translated as “a calling into question,” or “a gut check” in the American vernacular. Because of issues of confidentiality, I would rather not say which non-Western Rosetta Stone language I was trying to learn, but I would tell you in person should we have the chance. In any case, while I do not endorse Rosetta Stone for everyone, or even for anyone, even, I would say that I was much more amused with it for five lessons, and only felt frustrated around lesson six. But even then, Rosetta Stone did not insistently tell me that I needed to cooperate and pretend to understand!
Merci Mark de ta réponse et je comprends que tu veuilles te protéger. Malheureusement il faut toujours se protéger ici aux Etats-Unis contre d’éventuelles poursuites judiciaires!
Ce n’est pas contre d’éventuelles poursuites judiciaires que je veux me protéger, ce n’est même pas que je veux me protéger, moi. C’est le professeur aussi qui a le droit de rester anonyme!
Mark, je n’avais pas saisi la chose sous cet angle. Merci de ta clarification. Je suis d’accord.
Oh, your story is a good reminder how it feels to be lost in the L2 woods because a teacher didn’t make the input comprehensible enough. My students know, however, that they can always tell me to go slower and signal non-comprehension. Of course, I am not sure how many of them honestly do that. I need to make sure to go slow.
This point is just too huge. Here we are starting another week and many of us are going too fast. We absolutely need to make sure that we go slowly. Absolutely.
When they tune it out, it’s because they don’t understand. Let’s get a repetition on that – when they tune out, they don’t understand. Just because they know to indicate to us when they don’t understand doesn’t mean they do it. They in fact don’t, as a rule.
So, we have to keep the most important of all the (hundreds of) hats we wear firmly on our head, the SLOW hat, where we take full responsibility for holding them accountable to SHOW US that they are lost.
If we catch them not understanding on a micro level, where it is just a few words, we avoid the macro situation where the entire class doesn’t get it. It is so important to catch them at every turn, at every single thing we say. Thank you, Charlotte.
One thing that gives Ben Slavic’s take on TPRS such appeal is that fundamental care given to comprehension checks, and widespread comprehension checks. I do believe the ACTFL crowd, especially the Rick Donatos and the Bill Van Pattens, are aligning themselves with that strategy. One fault we have at the R1 universities is a sort of self-imposed need to invent and move on to the next great thing without implementing the inventions at a deep level. This has happened with CI, I believe. For many in the universities, CI is “been there, done that” and “so 1980s.” My hope is that people such as Zoltán Dörnyei (see http://www.zoltandornyei.co.uk) will bring renewed interest to CI and TPRS through the renewed interest they are stirring up in the psychology of the second langusge learner.
Mark,
Thank you for bringing to this PLC other pairs of eyes, so to speak . May be this professor can get us a little more enlightened by what s being researched in the domain of L2 aquisition these days. It is nice to have you right there at the university level and bring another dimension to our daily discussions! I went to this professor’s website and he seems to be a very prolific writer, so I was wondering if you could steer us (me ) in the right direction. Are there some research he s written that you have read that would be of interest to us? Something we may be able to ponder on, or that we may apply in our practice?
Merci d’avance.
If CI is of the past, then I’m a wingding. The stance of people who call it old stuff is missing an important ingredient, namely the high interest we find nowhere but in CI.
The high interest kind of CI is the exact platfrom from which we catapult our students out of their conscious focus and awareness of the language, and beyond that dry and barren soil to where acquisition actual takes place in the deep and rich soil of the unconscious mind via sleep, where the mind is free to process the CI it heard that day without all that annoying intervention from so called foreign language teachers.
We get our students focused on the meaning and not on the vehicle for its delivery – that is the tremendous impact of CI in a classroom and why I disgree that it is old hat. It is precisely on this point, in my opinion, where the brainiacs part company with our movement and why there are so few university people involved with us.
It is also why, I have no doubt, that you yourself Mark must in some way may be being targeted by your collegues at Boulder as a bit “out there” – I’m just guessing on that but I kicked the last university nerd off this blog. When I did so I told Krashen and he named the person – University of Iowa. He must be psychic too.
Your position is safe here Mark and I echo what Sabrina said that we need and want your perspective here. I have no doubt that this is one of the few places where meaningful dialogue is taking place between secondary and post-secondary teachers. So, again, a big welcome.
If you think about it, by being “out there”, you are simply acknowledging what Krashen has already shown – that languages cannot be acquired by their conscious analysis. That just ain’t gonna happen.
Then, when we remove the brainiacs from the only turf they know – their chatter that is all centered entirely in the conscious realm of dusty talk and dry analysis of unimportant numbers – they suddenly have no clothes on, and they scramble to regain their emperor status by flatly and strongly rejecting anything Krashen. That stance, with your position there in Boulder, now has less stability. Soldier on, dude!
Hi Sabrina,
I’m just making my way through some of Dörnyei’s most recent articles and books, so I cannot claim any expertise on his body of writings. What I really like about his work is the part about how motivation is a central issue (most SLA researchers assume all learners intend on learning the L2 they are studying, or they assume L2 motivation is stable, and Dörnyei takes quite another view on both of those counts). Just from the titles of his articles, however, I might recommend this one:
Shoaib, A., & Dörnyei. Z. (2005). Affect in life-long learning: Exploring L2 motivation as a dynamic process. In P. Benson & D. Nunan (Eds.), Learners’ stories: Difference and diversity in language learning (pp. 22-41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
I believe you can actually download that from his website, by the way.
I had an email exchange with Ben Slavic this fall and I asked him how TPRS students fare once they go on to college classrooms, and the report, unfortunately and perhaps unsurprisingly, was not positive at all. This would confirm what Dörnyei says about learner motivation being dynamic (it can go up, and boy, can it go down, and that’s a real problem when motivation is central to the L2 learning process). I’m also not an expert on Krashen’s body of work, but I would be a little surprised if he has investigated how the lack of articulation of university curricula from high school CI-based methods affects (negatively) learner motivation. Because Dörnyei asks just that type of question, his work is up and coming right now in my mind.
Mark,
Thank you so much for your prompt answer. I will follow your recommendation for approaching these readings and revert back when I can.
I m so glad you mention motivation, yes it is a buzz word in education today and may be cliché to some degree. I have always thought that it was the missing piece for me to become a successful teacher. How do I motivate most of my kids, if not all?
Because I teach such a wide spectrum of kids, from my Acdemic center kids who are super talented and acquire French soooo fast ( 7th and 8th graders in a selective enrollment program) , to my IB kids who are super competitive and just as motivated , to the regular high school students whose ranges and abilities differ greatly, but for most of whom, unfortunately lack the intrinsic motivation to learn anything (for so many various reasons we have talke about here at nauseum). I have them all and I do see anecdotally that motivation is the missing ingredient because I teach the same way each and every class. Have you heard of the Pygmalion effect, which posits that the teacher’s expectations of the students influences the kids learning outcomes? Well I enter my classroom each and every year setting high expectations for ALL my kids and , despite this, find that some of them do not thrive as I would like them to do. I think motivation is the reason. So the real question to me is framed through a paradigm shift in which I ask myself how do I motivate my kids so they can acquire to their fullest potential? TPRS adresses some of that in the personalization piece and the going slow piece and all the rest ,but I m not sure it adresses the motivation piece entirely.
Hi Sabrina,
I believe that when you read Dörnyei, you’ll understand that every student is qualified as motivated, because this is a measurement, but I certainly get your drift. Intrinsic motivation has probably more often been referred to as “integrative motivation,” but these categories and ways of thinking about motivation reach back to the late 50’s when Canadian researchers in Québec were first beginning to ask why students with ostensibly the same general language aptitude had vastly different language outcomes. Dörnyei’s mentor was one of the pioneers of that grand tradition, but Dörnyei is using lots of neat stuff like identity, the concept of the future self, and the imaginary to explain why we can no longer make neat and clean dichotomies with integrative motivation versus instrumental motivation, or why motivation doesn’t remain fixed as one kind versus another. When a great teacher rocks students’ worlds, suddenly that stable, fixed motivation thaws out and starts flowing.
Hi Mark,
Thank you for continuing with this conversation and providing your expertise and guidance, it is very helpful and thank you for your time and input!
I was able to download the article you recommended but was not able to download the chapters you were referring to. Perhaps I can find them through the research database at the university I studied at.
The article was very interesting in outlining the “temporal progression of student motivation” over a two decade span. Its conclusion that motivation is not a “stable but dynamic process that fluctuates over time” certainly makes sense at least instictually for me. What I understood from a first reading is the existence of a continuum and distinct phases in the process of motivation ( that may differ with individual differences?), just like acquisition has phases that differ with individuals . However, because the subjects of the research were aged from 18 through 34, I am not sure it would necessarily apply to our high and middle schoolers because they are at a different stage developmentally. However, it was a great read and there is a quote at the end that really resonated with me because it reminded me of my personal experience when I moved to the US. It is from another researcher (Lim) and pertains to “time spent in a host environment , i.e country where L2 is spoken and which was one of the motivational factor that affects language acquisition .
It goes: “Because I no longer believed that perfection was necessary to communicate and because I had shown that I could communicate, I now regained control over my own learning…..
That experience_ managing with my english_ gave me great inspiration and motivation to continue to improve. I discovered that what my teachers had been telling me was not true. I could reach my goal without being perfect…. (Lim 2002, p 100)
Great comment here, Sabrina. My view is that we don’t even need to think about how we motivate kids. We just keep our hearts open. We can’t always SEE what the effects our open heart will have on a child. What we CAN do is teach and think about keeping open heart in spite of our insecurities and our fears and the attacks and hope that we don’t get hit next month like Jeff got hit in November. Kids can push back on our egos a lot, but they cannot push back on love if it is freely given with no expectation of any of it being returned to us. That is the fractal shift we are in now in teaching. That is why the data looks so ridiculous. That is why the old way cannot work anymore. That is why the word research no longer means anything. It is all because the word love has entered the game, the listening for cute answers, the open hearts of the kids in the midst of the cheerful and funny banter that arrives from the questioning and which happens at the expense of no one. It is that love that floats our boats, our work, our stories, our hopes as teachers. It is that love that the mere mention of brings hostile reactions by those who don’t want to open their hearts. That is what is happening now and why what we are doing, each of us so clumsily but together with real effect, is so important to the world. When I think of the people who have embraced this way of teaching, I am happy to be soldiering along among them. So my own personal answer to your question “how do I motivate my kids so they can acquire to their fullest potential?” is to love them and not expect anything in return. We do not know even know what a motivated kid looks like. For all we know, the kid with the closed heart may look like the most motivated kid because he wants to get the scholarship for college so he can become an Ayn Randian predator. And the least motivated kid may be that way because they have been made to fear life, and it is that one happy class in storyland that daily feeds them enough emotionally to walk home, sleep, get up and do it the next day. We don’t know what is going on. We just know that something big is going on. I like it that way. Find a story. Teach it. Laugh. Go home. Go to work the next day. Do it again. That’s my own plan. Fuck the rest of it.
Thank you Ben for your kind words. I have a lot of love in my heart for all of my kids, but that is just not enough for me. Let’s agree to disagree here.
Despite my loving and my trying to make it fun and all that good stuff, there are still kids that I cannot motivate. And it bugs me, and it’s hard for me to just pretend . Being the thinking person that I am, I’d like to think there are other answers out there and I refuse to be complacent so I am going to keep on searching for other reasons and answers, that is just me though. Please don’t be offended, this is just the mood I’m in now…..
Sabrina,
Please remember that you are only seeing the tiny bit of the student that s/he will allow..an ENORMOUS part of who that person is is unseen….and you ARE affecting that child. You have to go on faith with this. Just yesterday a former colleague was subbing in the building and spoke with me about a former student. Her husband is tutoring that young man, who is now working on his GED in prison. He shared with his tutor the teachers who had given him hope, and exactly what the teachers had done to do that. He remembered very specific moments and conversations that I am sure that those teachers have long forgotten. But to that young man, those moments are very much alive and giving him hope even today. It’s happening. It is. People develop in a curious way….and way beyond our control. That does not mean that we don’t have a positive influence.
with love,
Laurie
I’m sure we would all love to change a lot more in education than we can, but we can’t. So that is the St. Francis Prayer, right? With the kids we can’t change, we ain’t gonna change them. They will remember our kindness to them. We just give and give and give. We are teachers.
Another compelling side to Ben Slavic’s and other TPRS teachers’ work is this unabashed use of the word ‘love,’ a word that no doubt strikes fear in the hearts of many a social scientist (how do you operationalize love?). As a unreconstructed Freirean from the 80s, I agree with Ben about love, and I also believe, perhaps out of egoism, that there must be something that the evidence-based crowd of researchers can actually do that is useful for TPRS teachers. I believe people such as Steve Thorne and Zoltán Dörnyei will have something to offer us if we are patient and listen and dialogue with them. If someone tried to make you believe that people such as Dörnyei are only psychometric wonks, what would they do with this article:
Lepp-Kaethler, E., & Dörnyei, Z. (in press). The role of sacred texts in enhancing motivation and living the vision in second language acquisition. In Wong, M. S., Kristjánsson, C., & Dörnyei, Z. (Eds.), Christian faith and English language teaching and learning: Research on the interrelationship of religion and ELT (pp. 171-188). New York: Routledge.
(Please note that I’m not advocating proselytizing in our classrooms, but I just want to point out that passion is not divorced from Dörnyei’s thoughts about language teaching.)
I believe that Ben has implied that TPRS without love for the students robs the method of its spirit and makes it vulnerable to becoming a technocratically tyrannical power. I fully support that notion, and even suspect that we can provide evidence for it.
Amen.
with love,
and quite happy about that,
Laurie
Mark I want to run my missives to Helena Curtain by the group first and that includes you since you have the university perspective and the argot but at the same time you see it in a different way than most professors, which gives you a unique perspective. What you said above is very powerful. So I am going to go slowly on this and it will take me at least a month to put together. I have a tendency to want to attack, and must avoid doing that if Helena (and skip with the U of Maine folks he is dealing with up there) are to actually hear our (uniquely valid but muted) points. So thanks Mark. I will credit anything you add into the final product, of course. We may need you as this thing takes off as someone who can speak their tongue, a kind of interpreter, as it were. This gets interestinger and interestinger.
Which report are you referring to? I have seen large numbers of CI-trained students excel at the college level.
with love,
Laurie
Laurie, Mark is using the word report to describe what I told him – from my own experience – about the dismal experiences many CI kids have had at the college level when faced with grammar driven programs taught by teachers who don’t use CI. I have actually heard no reports to the contrary, but that is just me, I’m sure. I certainly hope I didn’t mislead Mark.
I am now up to about eight kids who went from my CI Russian program into high levels at prestigious places…told that they “didn’t need any more language” if they didn’t want to take it at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, and others I can’t think of. They end up going into the 4th or 5th-year classes; one went to the heritage level at Yale. Admittedly, they were mostly from the bunch of highly gifted kids who had me for either five or six years.
Whenever a college or university includes writing and speaking in their entrance exam, my kids rock. When they sit down to a grammar test, they flail, so I have a very talented kid who went into level 2. But on the other hand, she says it’s really easy there, and, like another kid who went to a small Baptist college in Texas, has been asked to help teach the class. Two kids went to our local program, entered themselves into level two, but got moved by the teacher up a year and then won year-long scholarships to study abroad. My favorite story of all though, is that of a socially-behind student, whose mom attributes her abilities to speaking in public now to my Russian classes. When she did her entrance test locally, the native-speaking examiner started off asking her where she’d studied in Russia. The girl tried to explain she’d never been to Russia and the instructor said she knew she was hiding something because no one could speak and write that well without in-country experience. The same teacher, of course, killed off all our interesting, in-language classes here and offers comparative lit in English and only grammar in Russian. Oh well.
Dismal is right! They test into high levels because they can speak, and then they are crushed by the grammar machine. It is heart-breaking. Only the strong survive. Like maybe one a year. That has been my experience too.
That’s right. I was not referring to a study, but rather to a comment Ben made in an email exchange with me, which is borne out by some of the subsequent email, although the Russian side of things seems to be much more uplifting. In Michele’s report below, I’m glad Irina Dolgova and the rest of the Yale Russian department placed her student at the correct (heritage) level. While I have many fond memories of the department, I did not see a lot of TPRS-type activity there, and that student probably would have been bored to tears in any class below 4th year.
There is a great article just waiting to be written on this question of where do TPRS students end up once they go to college, and how well to they fare in the new language learning environment.
We cannot control college classes. Without TPRS these students would have never made it through high school classes! Our teaching a different way would not have made them more successful in a grammar class…period. It’s not our fault if upper level classes are grammar focused.
On that note, it may be in our best interest to get to know college programs and be able to steer our kids who WANT to continue towards programs that will respect their strengths. A decade ago, that might have been unthinkable…but we are a large enough, and strong enough, force these days to start advocating for students and for college programs that will help them continue on their language journey.
with love,
Laurie
That’s a great idea. There are many college folks who would be amazed at the energy and goodness that I witnessed this past summer at the iFLT conference in Breckenridge. It might be a Ballad of a Thin Man moment for some of them, but still, it would open many eyes.
So my wish is that anytime anybody gets any hard information about where their TPRS kids end up in their college environments, we send it to Mark for this article. I will make a new category right now in that interest – the College TPRS follow-up project/Mark Knowles.
Y’all don’t forget. Every time you find out stuff send it to Mark. Anne you have an article about this somewhere here. You find it or I will. I remember how much pain it caused you to see your Hogs – the unique and unforgettable Hogs whom I got to teach French in Maine – gettting slaughtered at the U of Maine and the other institutions they want to. Mark you have to have seen these kids’ German to believe it. And they got cut up pretty bad in college. I’ll look for that article by Anne.
I *NEED* to post now what happened to me today: (it was SO CUTE!!!!)
I have a student, I’ll call him “Travis”. Had him last year, and he was SO not in focus!!! Didn’t do a DAMN thing in class!!! I had attributed it to being lazy, because I found out in so many ways that he was a REALLY bright kid!!!
Well, this year I introduced Ben’s “hand over the head” for the kids to tell me when they didn’t “get it.” Well, Travis is NOT shy about telling me when he doesn’t get it!!! (love it!)
But today he did something DIFFERENT!!! Instead of flying his hand over head front-to-back, he did it in the opposite direction! — back-to-front.
I stopped class, and asked, “Trav, you OK? what did you miss?” and he said, “Nothing! I was letting you know that *I GET IT* ….so I was swiping my hand in the OPPOSITE direction.”
hahahaha === I laughed SO hard!!!
MB,
He sent you a nonverbal signal letting you know he understood. WOW! What a great testimony of your rapport with the kid and your teaching. YOU ARE THE BEST!!!
I like your use of the term a “nonverbal signal”. If you remember, jGR used to say that the student must engage the teacher “visually” to get a 3 or above on that game changing rubric, but now I have replaced it with the term “negotiates meaning non-verbally”. I’m just pointing that out here, and for those who haven’t yet had a chance to view my latest version (open to suggestions) of the jPG here it is:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/11/14/jgr-update-november-2012-latest-version/
I might add that if a child does not engage us non-verbally, like MB’s awesome reverse hand glider dude, then we owe it to them and to ourselves to give the 2 grade for that failure. jGR only works if we are honest with the student.
Thank you Sabrina!! It did feel good – I had a BAAAAD night last night grading papers — I felt like such a failure as a teacher! The kids are “leaving” me in the middle of January, and I’m afraid they won’t be “up to snuff” going to the other teacher. I wish I could “Teach for June”; but, alas, we are on 4×4 Block scheduling, so I only get to “Teach for January”.
But, I also found today that these kids are making incredible connections! I did a dictee and their spelling was FANTASTIC!! (and that’s without giving spelling tests!) Another student asked about the present progressive – could he use that in place of the plain-old “present” and he asked me what the difference was! (this student has done NOTHING all semester so far! — but this question came from him, as I was doing pop-up grammar!)
Gosh, this method SO works – if only one has patience!!! and LOVES the students!