Katya Paukova just spent four days teaching in Anchorage. If you haven’t watched her, find a way. She’s going to be a little less available for a while now, because of a full-time teaching job at DLI, so the moment there is an opportunity, take it. Katya taught an auditorium of 300 people Russian for over an hour, and they loved every minute.
I’ve seen Katya teach three times now and monopolized her for probably too many more after-hours, asking questions. This time I decided to write down some of her tricks.
First, she is happy with every right answer. She points out when someone gets a grammatical answer right. She repeats students’ correct answers to the class, and therefore it is not anything different or reproachful when she rephrases a slightly incorrect answer.
Katya said one of the target phrases 80 times in 15 minutes. I stopped counting after that. She later pointed out that some people were still looking at the board for the word, so we can’t assume that one class will teach a word.
But later, when she wants to repeat and retell, she is straightforward. “I want you to hear these structures some more times, so I am going to ask for some help retelling this story.” Then she retells with some mistakes, some questions, some slight elaborations. I usually try to disguise my repetitions. But her students understood her purpose. Honesty works.
Katya frequently does the ten-finger comprehension checks. I have been forgetting those lately. She tells people to keep their fingers in the air until she has finished looking at their area. You can feel her slow down if there are too few 10’s.
Katya is very strict about not having too many out of bound words. This is a big lesson for me. She says it’s too much to use more than about three in a class session. She uses dozens of cognates, slowly, carefully, to be able to repeat the target structures more often. She doesn’t hold back on grammar, but there again, doesn’t call attention to the cases except for those that she’s working on.
A wonderful addition to writing the words on the board was that Katya told students she would underline parts of the words that could possibly change. They weren’t to worry about it, just recognize the base words. In Russian, the question word “What kind” can have at least nine different endings. I am going back to my room to underline those final, changeable letters so that students will have fewer puzzled looks.
There’s more: the obvious enjoyment of telling a story together, the singing, the calling on people when they are looking at her so that they have a choice, the insistence on having a story ready that will make people laugh, and the preparation with back-up ideas. By the third story in the class, people are waiting to see what Katya has come up with this time. I am going to throw in more wrenches when I write class stories.
Go see Katya. Whether you already speak Russian or not, you will learn a great deal about TPRS.