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Visual PQA – 2
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41 thoughts on “Visual PQA – 2”
This is a great example of ‘FEED THE NEED”. Julie has done what great teachers do:
1. Break the new information down into manageable chunks.
2. Present it using a variety of ‘modes”.
3. Interact with the information so that the students are confident, successful, and communicative.
We’ve talked many times on this list how ONE structure at a time can be more functional than three. Julie’s class is another example of how it makes the new language more accessible and comprehensible for students.
Having the “information” available in a picture format via PP helps students to VISUALIZE which we all know is key!!!! It also is an ENORMOUS help for students that age whose minds can “drift” every few seconds. Having an image front and center reminds them when they refocus where the class is and where they should be.
PROVIDING A FRAMEWORK for answers is also highly successful!!!!! Blaine can actually do this without “planning”, but he’s one of the few people who manages it. For the rest of us, and particularly those of us who need to work by or show admins a plan, these frameworks provide options within a context that make sense….which many students need!!!!!
Last week in Maine we talked about this very thing….putting 3 or 4 options on the board..using the structure…. so that the students feel confident about answering. It’s very, very helpful….for teachers AND students. Not everyone needs or wants it….but the vast majority of us can use that strategy.
I think that you will hear from others Ben, who, without knowing they were doing something brilliant have done things similar to what Julie has done. (Julie…we all want to meet you!!!!!!!) They may have even thought that they were doing something “wrong” because it wasn’t something they had seen at a training. But it worked with THEIR students…which always makes it right!!!
So I encourage us all, with or without technology, to ask ourselves if any of the 3 steps above could help us w/using new structures w/ our students. As Carol pointed out to me yesterday…it’s time to “freshen” things up as often as possible!! This could be one way to do it.
Thanks Julie! Thanks Ben!
with love,
Laurie
…I think that you will hear from others Ben, who, without knowing they were doing something brilliant have done things similar to what Julie has done….
Yes. I am sure that this is true. I am curious to see if others in the group say that. But it has to be so. Identifying this process is exciting. It’s like we’re doing it in our classrooms but it hasn’t been formally identified yet. One or two teachers in Denver presenting written options when doing PQA while a group of teachers in Maine does the same thing in at the same time not knowing others are doing it. Things emerge from all those people out there who are experimenting in their classrooms and new things keep emerging. It’s like we’re all mad scientists!
…Last week in Maine we talked about this very thing….putting 3 or 4 options on the board..using the structure….
Yes again. The presentation of written options is huge. When I was talking with Julie after the session I remember her excitedly discussing this and I tried to find out where she heard it and she didn’t remember. I think she just started doing it naturally after hearing Carol speak in the fall here in Denver because she needed to anchor her classes.
The fact that you in Maine were doing the same thing at the same time reminds me about how Suggestopedia came about. A guy in Bulgaria named Dr. Georgi Lozanov was working in the 1950’s on how to open up the unconscious mind with music and how that speeds up learning (2000 new words in 24 days using 3 45 min. periods a day, with successive stages endlessly), a process connected to yoga.
Lozanov called it originally Suggestive Accelerated Learning and it became known as Suggestopedia and it can be used for any subject. Anyway, a little later in the 60’s in Columbia and later in Spain a Dr. Alfonso Caycedo Lozano founded Sophologie, a way of learning also based on relaxed psychological states and yoga principles, who actually went to India and studied with one of the Dali Lama’s doctors.
Anyway, at about the same time in history – before Simon Belasco and Krashen – two doctors (Georgi Lozano was a medical doctor as well) set about to unlock the unconscious mind, one via deep yogic breathing and music and the other through a term called Dynamic Relaxation, to accelerate learning, and both had somewhere in their names the name Lozano.
I don’t want to read too much into the name thing and that they both knew about yoga and developed their methods (Suggestopedia and Sophrology) at the same time, but I do want to suggest that even in little things sometimes, like the presentation of written options when doing PQA, such a small detail but huge for the close reader and student of how people best learn languages here in our group, things sometimes emerge into our awareness at the same time, like they just need to show up so they do.
Related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erAGNOvMnE4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRJG7fLpm1c
This idea, new to me but not others, needs a good name because I want to write it up in Stepping Stones. The floor is open for suggestions. How about:
PQA via Preparing Slides with Written Options
Preparing Slides with Written Options to Target Structures
I know, not great. Think of something.
Also, I have been looking more into where this came from and it comes from Carol Gaab. I figured it out. In her workshops for some time now, unlike Blaine and Von who do the old kind of PQA – not that there’s anything wrong with that – Carol constantly uses images and some captions. That is where Julie got that. Yea! I figured it out.
It’s important that we credit people in this work. We don’t do that all the time because we are all in this powerful soup being prepared and so ideas get mixed so that the soup tastes good. But yeah, Carol is behind this idea of preparing slides with written options. Those who have been to her workshops know that she does this quite frequently with slides of her classes when she teaches the San Francisco Giants.
(I understand that Carol is now consulting with MLB in the DR about pro prospects’ language abilities. It’s another hat, this time a baseball cap, for our fearless and indefatigable uber leader.
How about PowerPoint PQA (pptPQA)
An excellent suggestion Mary Beth but from what Mary Overton said – and you’ll be hearing that name a lot from DPS, another young super talent – there are new technologies that will blow away the speed and convenience of Power Point. I have no details yet on that, however.
Ben wrote:
“(I’m trying to figure out how to upload Julie’s slides to this article but am having trouble with that – it can’t read them when I try to import them.)”
Ben, what if you put the slides on a google presentation and give us the link? I would love to see something as well as read about it.
How about calling it Visual PQA ? (since there are captions and pictures)
Both excellent suggestions Ruth. I’m on it. Visual PQA. That’s got a real streak of badass in it.
Did you just change the title of the post or did I just suggest what you had already called it? That would be very silly! 😉
I am going with that term because it perfectly describes the activity. Unless something better comes along but I doubt it. I credited you in both posts at the end. It’s the perfect term.
And it has an acronym! vPQA.
Good because I have a feeling we’re going to be talking a lot about it for awhile now, as per Laurie’s request. That’s a lot less letters to keyboard in. For those wondering why the v is in lower case, blame jen. She started it.
At workshops Carol always insists on the importance of visual help: photos, drawings, slides, objects, realia…Anything to help clarify and engage. She suggests having a binder or iFolder with pictures. What Julie has done using PP slides is truly remarkable. It’s an art: understanding + remembering what teachers share at workshops. Then making it our own, with some tweaking to fit our classroom. Some stuff gets lost along the way. Thanks again Ben and Laurie. Very helpful.
You mentioned the binders, Bu Catharina. In Julie’s class, there were five sections in the kids’ binders:
1. Vocabulary – I’m not sure how this works.
2. Do Now responses. This is across the board in all subjects in DPS. As the kids walk in they see a slide with four things that they have to respond to in their notebooks once they are settled in their seats – they write out the date (this could include the weather) and then she asks three random questions to which the kids respond I’m not sure whether in Spanish or English, need clarification on that. That lasts seven minutes exactly. She could put up a timer on the screen actually. I saw Mark Mullaney do that the day before at the Denver School of the Arts. Then I think she gives three minutes to processing that writing. Great way to start a class. (Mark started his classes with FVR.)
3. All writing – free writes, dictees, etc.
4. Readings. Julie makes handouts of all Step 3 readings from stories and they go in those binders. The kids want them.
5. Quizzes and tests.
I’m so glad you mentioned the notebooks Bu Catharina because many of us just don’t have the option of NOT having notebooks in our buildings. I used to use them but found it kind of useless, but a notebook like the way Julie designed hers is useful, the kids really like having them because they think that is what school is about, so the parents like it, and the admins are happy because they get to check off another box.
It’s good teaching. Focusing the Lesson (the visual) Scaffolding for Success (the options) Julie is obviously a natural, perceptive teacher!!
It also helps students to be aware of what they are doing. This counteracts the “free-floating” feeling that many students are nervous about and admins. criticize. These are the things that help teachers to keep their jobs. The notebooks do the same.
As for the visuals…here are other options:
Posters : I have several GREAT posters, one being three mariachi singers who are open-mouthed and just begging to be part of the class. I tape them to the white board, ask a class artist to come in after school and draw a backgroup around them and voila! We used and reused these guys in a million situations from Homecoming Dance to a Je Suis Charlie demonstration.
REAL ART: Oh the stories and the questions…. Think the classics: Las Meninas, Girl w/a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa (stay away from the naked ones lol) In your target culture or out. Great stuff
Screen shots: Why save these for Movie talk?
Pics of kids: Enough said, they provide them.
Often I choose a picture and then look for structures that go with it. That is much faster then thinking of a structure and searching for a pic.
Just ask yourself…..what high frequency phrase could I use to talk with kids about this? how can I get to know the kids with this? how can I get the kids to talk about this?
Just like stories….sometimes the pic goes up at the end of the class and I have kids brainstorm in TL or English about what we could talk about w/it. Use their ideas and they are invested.
Once they get the idea….they send their own for you to use. :o)
Use what you already do well….and ask yourself….how can I add a pic to this?
Then ask yourself…what are 3-4 possible answers using the structures that I can provide for scaffolded support. The kids will either use your examples as is OR use your examples to be creative and build on them.
Would love to see people try this one time this week and share how it went!!
with love,
Laurie
…I think that you will hear from others Ben, who, without knowing they were doing something brilliant have done things similar to what Julie has done….
The idea of captioning images and spinning out PQA probably happens all the time in TCI classrooms, just perhaps not as the first step (look & discuss, freeze frame readings, screenshot BookTalks). Using this as “step 1” may be “new” to some people. And that may be part of the breakdown of the 3 steps as we see them for what they really are: ways to get more compelling and comprehensible reps. What is special about personalization (student’s real lives) or customization (the imaginary co-created by students) is the sense of ownership and the community that co-creation builds as the story, the PQA, and the reading belong to the class.
Some of my experiences and thoughts:
I think the image and a little reading that contains the target structures is fabulous scaffolding. The traditional 3 steps currently run from abstract -> concrete, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?
There was recently a thread “Readings before story-asking?” on moreTPRS to which there were was some debate and may be relevant to this discussion. If people want to check it out:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/moretprs/conversations/topics/143374
I wrote (and not everyone will agree): “Personally, I think it makes sense to do a 1 paragraph reading with circling and some spinning out (PQA/parallel story questioning) with the new structures as part of the establishing meaning phase. The visual CI is like scaffolding for the aural CI.”
I commented on this forum October 2013 on what I saw Laurie Clarcq do at the Maine Conference: https://benslavic.com/blog/forum/general-discussion-1/maine-tci-conference/
I included these 2 observations based on what I saw Laurie do:
“The power of visualization – use pictures to define new structures. Project the pictures. Ask students to close their eyes and to visualize the pictures when they hear the vocabulary spoken.”
“PQA: 1. To keep in-bounds, give kids lists of answers. Example: Drinks tea, milk, blood. The focus is not on those extra words (the focus is on “drinks”), but some kids may acquire them.”
Here’s a Screenshot BookTalk I used with the MT Frozen. Though I used this after the MT, had it been used as step 1 I imagine it is similar to what Julie and others are doing, mixing images with captions and PQA.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d37_Ya06nmPWFYEKGuM4EyxyMER-ft_ToUA_FYIAqGE/edit?usp=sharing
Has anyone ever seen what Ellen Shrager means by “Visual CI”?
http://www.90percenttargetlanguage.com/main.html
Drawbacks to PPT PQA (with images and captions):
– reading before enough aural CI could impede good pronunciation.
– lots of prep work for the teacher to find images, caption, and put into PPT
– puts some limits on the flow of the conversation because the image/text is a “given”
After attending the 2013 Maine conference I tried PPT PQA. My experience was that a lot of time went into creating the PPT and the PQA still wasn’t great. I still hadn’t grasped 2 essential PQA ingredients – What I’ve found is that in order for PQA to really work, the 2 most important ingredients are:
1) the structures have to really gel together (cause and effect relationships – credit: LClarcq)
2) they have to be structures that can be used for discussion about events the kids really want to talk about (breaking a bone, losing a tooth, getting in trouble, control of the tv remote, etc.).
So, another way (without the above drawbacks) to make PQA more concrete is to have the student artist or the teacher draw the PQA for all to see and have the teacher write on the image (like done in Look & Discuss).
If PQA is “a way to practice the targets” and that is how the teacher AND the students feel about it, then it feels fake and it flops – it stays in the conscious mind. Practice of targets is what we teachers have in mind when we do PQA, but it shouldn’t feel like that. I have totally felt that subtle difference in my classes.
What I’ve been doing:
Step 1: personalized mini-stories (PQA)
Step 2: customized mini-story (Story)
personalized – truths (often embellished) about students’ lives, students play themselves in the stories (may be a retell of true personal history)
customized – students provide the cute answers so it came from the students and is relevant to them, but not about students’ lives
*IMO, you could do only step 1 or only step 2. In terms of SLA, it’s the compelling & comprehensible reps that count. I like these 2 steps though, because they are different, and we get to celebrate students in step 1.
. I have a character wall. If I see a cool drawing in a student’s notebook I ask to make a copy, they sign it and it may become a character in the future. Of course I have characters of stories we have created as a class. I plan on making frames out of cool paper and making a gallery.
Nice: personalized celebrities!
In the December IJFLT article I categorized the various ways of using visuals with a collection of what I called TeacherTalks. Obviously it is a play on what is popular in our community MovieTalks. MusicTalks, ArtTalks, CultureTalks, StudentTalks, PictureTalks, PropTalks, or fill in the blank Talks…
Why wait for MovieTalks to show cool pics? Good question…they say a picture is worth a 1000 words, and a TPRSer couldn’t agree more.
I think it would be great if we shared visuals in one spot for all…check out http://www.blendspace.com
The great thing about Blendspace is that the slides can hold notes for target structures or teacher notes for someone trying to figure out what the images could be used for.
Blendspace. I haven’t even gone to the site yet. Gives me goose pimples. I will repeat Mike’s suggestion:
…I think it would be great if we shared visuals in one spot for all….
Anybody else got goose pimples? (I just wanted to get a rep on goose pimples for our foreign PLC members ‘who may not know them as such.) Oops, got another rep on goose pimples. Oh, there’s another one. Well, maybe if I had a picture of some goose pimples I wouldn’t need all the reps. What do I know?….
Ok, so I tried to post this earlier and it wouldn’t, so I’m gonna break it down into smaller comments:
“…I think that you will hear from others Ben, who, without knowing they were doing something brilliant have done things similar to what Julie has done….”
The idea of captioning images and spinning out PQA probably happens all the time in TCI classrooms, just perhaps not as the first step (look & discuss, freeze frame readings, screenshot BookTalks). Using this as “step 1? may be “new” to some people. And that may be part of the breakdown of the 3 steps as we see them for what they really are: ways to get more compelling and comprehensible reps. What is special about personalization (student’s real lives) or customization (the imaginary co-created by students) is the sense of ownership and the community that co-creation builds as the story, the PQA, and the reading belong to the class.
Some of my experiences and thoughts:
I think the image and a little reading that contains the target structures is fabulous scaffolding. The traditional 3 steps currently run from abstract -> concrete, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?
There was recently a thread “Readings before story-asking?” on moreTPRS to which there were was some debate and may be relevant to this discussion. If people want to check it out:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/moretprs/conversations/topics/143374
I wrote (and not everyone will agree): “Personally, I think it makes sense to do a 1 paragraph reading with circling and some spinning out (PQA/parallel story questioning) with the new structures as part of the establishing meaning phase. The visual CI is like scaffolding for the aural CI.”
I commented on this forum October 2013 on what I saw Laurie Clarcq do at the Maine Conference: https://benslavic.com/blog/forum/general-discussion-1/maine-tci-conference/
I included these 2 observations based on what I saw Laurie do:
“The power of visualization – use pictures to define new structures. Project the pictures. Ask students to close their eyes and to visualize the pictures when they hear the vocabulary spoken.”
“PQA: 1. To keep in-bounds, give kids lists of answers. Example: Drinks tea, milk, blood. The focus is not on those extra words (the focus is on “drinks”), but some kids may acquire them.”
Here’s a Screenshot BookTalk I used with the MT Frozen. Though I used this after the MT, had it been used as step 1 I imagine it is similar to what Julie and others are doing, mixing images with captions and PQA.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d37_Ya06nmPWFYEKGuM4EyxyMER-ft_ToUA_FYIAqGE/edit?usp=sharing
Has anyone ever seen what Ellen Shrager means by “Visual CI”?
http://www.90percenttargetlanguage.com/main.html
Drawbacks to PPT PQA (with images and captions):
– reading before enough aural CI could impede good pronunciation.
– lots of prep work for the teacher to find images, caption, and put into PPT
– puts some limits on the flow of the conversation because the image/text is a “given”
After attending the 2013 Maine conference I tried PPT PQA. My experience was that a lot of time went into creating the PPT and the PQA still wasn’t great. I still hadn’t grasped 2 essential PQA ingredients – What I’ve found is that in order for PQA to really work, the 2 most important ingredients are:
1) the structures have to really gel together (cause and effect relationships – credit: LClarcq)
2) they have to be structures that can be used for discussion about events the kids really want to talk about (breaking a bone, losing a tooth, getting in trouble, control of the tv remote, etc.).
So, another way (without the above drawbacks) to make PQA more concrete is to have the student artist or the teacher draw the PQA for all to see and have the teacher write on the image (like done in Look & Discuss).
If PQA is “a way to practice the targets” and that is how the teacher AND the students feel about it, then it feels fake and it flops – it stays in the conscious mind. Practice of targets is what we teachers have in mind when we do PQA, but it shouldn’t feel like that. I have totally felt that subtle difference in my classes.
This is always our challenge!!!! Our conscious teacher-brains get in our way.
” Practice of targets is what we teachers have in mind when we do PQA, but it shouldn’t feel like that. ”
or actually
“Practice of targets is what we teachers have in mind when we ________, but it shouldn’t feel like that. ”
Anything we do goes in the blank. :o)
It is our greatest challenge, particularly at a time when admins are requiring that “learning” be OBVIOUS AND OBSERVABLE.
But we can do it people, we can!!
with love,
Laurie
“If PQA is “a way to practice the targets” and that is how the teacher AND the students feel about it, then it feels fake and it flops”
Great point, Eric! When the PQA is actually a legitimate conversation about the students, it is easy and pleasurable. When PQA is really just a way to get repetitions and nothing more, the kids can’t help but completely disengage. They know that the conversation is mechanical and boring, and WE know that the conversation is mechanical and boring. Yet if I’m being honest with myself…I probably do a lot more phony PQA than authentic PQA.
You’re also totally right that choosing the “right” structures is vital. If I think “what would be fun to talk about today with the kids?”, I rarely choose dull structures. When I think “What structures will they need to know for the really dull text book stories I need to make them read?” or “I have used the 2nd person plural enough of or enough nouns in the genitive case. The high school teachers are going to be pissed when my middle schoolers come to them. They are going to get annihilated in high school Latin and then tell their parents, siblings, friends, teachers, classmates that I am a terrible teacher who didn’t teach them anything. My department head is going to give me a crappy evaluation because he’s mad that kids are complaining that I didn’t prepare them for Latin 2 and then they will need to drop down to Latin 1 and make his scheduling job more difficult”, I end up choosing structures like ‘you all wait’, ‘the man’s’ and ‘therefore’.
We need to keep reminding ourselves that the “P” in PQA is the most important ingredient. If we don’t focus on genuinely connecting with our kids, PQA becomes an arduous task that our students grow to resent.
As new as you are to this work, John, you have travelled rapidly into its secrets.
Thanks, Ben. Failure is a great teacher 🙂
Great points, John.
Hope you can make it over to Dudley, MA on March 13 for Laurie’s 6-hour workshop. It is only an hour away. (See Recent Posts: Laurie Clarcq in MA)
I am definitely in for that one, Nathaniel!
Look forward to seeing you again.
Just checked out the link to Ellen Shrager’s materials (then I downloaded the First Day in Mandarin from Teachers Pay Teachers). I imagine that Julie’s approach was much different. My reading of the materials Ellen created was that it was quite highly structured, a lot of new stuff at once, not enough reps (unless you did a lot of spin-offs — but her notes for the teacher suggested a lot of pair work on the first day of class
Plus I have philosophical issues with showing students pinyin and characters together ever, and with showing any characters for totally new words, but that’s a Chinese-specific issue. However, it does make me question using reading as I would introduce new vocabulary. With lower levels especially, if I used that much text in PQA with new vocab, it’d have to be characters for what they already know, and pinyin for the new words only. I don’t show characters on new stuff until after Steps 1 & 2 these days — it’s good. Then it’s characters & lots of reading aloud and reps on them.
Just did the same thing for French, downloaded Ellen Shrager’s materials for the first day. TPRS is in another league.
Eric, I like that you brought that discussion from MoreTPRS. In this forum and with Visual PQA it is another great idea to add to the list for us all.
That teachers’ basic question was…
“Does anyone do story reading before story asking?”
You said…
“Personally, I think it makes sense to do a 1 paragraph reading with circling and some spinning out (PQA/parallel story questioning) with the new structures as part of the establishing meaning phase. The visual CI is like scaffolding for the aural CI.”
I think your strategy is a good one. A paragraph could be/is the visual CI. I love that in this way the “targeted structures” would be presented in context for the students. If I were to categorize and label what you are referring to I would call it “ParagraphTalk.” (I know it is kind of a lame name but I totally get your point when I attach a simple title).
Terry’s reply to you was a bit…ummm…direct. I like the gist of what she wrote but if someone doesn’t know that we communicate a lot together there it could have come off a little rough. She, I think, was being protective of TPRS.
She wrote, “Will reading (first) provide compelling input?”
I think that is for the teacher in the room to decide. For some groups a ParagraphTalk might be compelling input and for others it might not be. We all probably do some form of this if we do read aloud activities. I am also glad you in a way are challenging the order of input and reading. In fact, you were really saying that the reading is the input from the very start and you are magnifying or highlighting that input through aural measures. Playing with this could lead to something new.
You are an advanced teacher and a ParagraphTalk is something you are trying to figure out. You are thinking out loud and experimenting searching for a way to improve the process of TCI. The only feeling I have with this discussion is that for now, this is an advanced teacher technique to start with a ParagraghTalk. I say this only to protect students from getting exposed to a reading and have to learn something new without the support and care of competent CI teacher.
Circling, PQA, and parallel characters all rely heavily on reading the faces of the people in the room. A ParagraphTalk might put the cart before the horse for teachers new to the process. When Ben walks around the room holding a football, he can feel the power and control and attention he is receiving. He leverages all that, he creates and fosters communication with his audience. I fear that that a traditional thinking teacher will think they are teaching with CCCCI when they might not be.
But really the most brilliant thing is that a ParagraphTalk is another thing to add to Visual PQA arsenal.
I also think that we have to remember that Terri teaches Chinese. She believes that the aural coomponent, particularly at the beginner level, is imperative. I think that ANY idea that works well with our students AND delivers good CI is worth doing. I do appreciate that she keeps us grounded…..It is sooooo easy to forget that students’ language skills are not where ours are. If we start with reading, we really do need to make sure that the sound accompanies the text. Otherwise, the word will be recorded in the students’ heads in whatever way their brain chooses to….not the way it is truly pronounced. They will still recognize the meaning in reading, but not aurally. It is a danger when we introduce reading early.
The moretprs audience is also a different venue. This particular group is hyper-focused…the other not so much. This group coonstantly brings its readers back to the basics. Terri takes on that role on the more list.
Thanks for the reminder that Julie was setting up a story. This is another layer of the CI/TPRS world that gets neglected. EVERY STRUCTURE IS INTRODUCED IN SO THAT IT WILL BE USED OVER AND OVER AGAIN LATER ON. We sometimes get so caught up in which structures to “teach” that we lose sight of why we are teaching them. :o)
with love,
Laurie
Laurie:
…if we start with reading, we really do need to make sure that the sound accompanies the text. Otherwise, the word will be recorded in the students’ heads in whatever way their brain chooses to….not the way it is truly pronounced….
Such a good point – thank you Laurie.
I really appreciate how Michael put it as well. It depends on who is teaching and who the students are. Eric could do anything. He is, like me, an experimenter and I would need to experiment with ParagraphTalk. My guess would be that 80% of my students could not do it. It would also be a real challenge to write a paragraph that did not go out of bounds.
Thinking of Julie’s classes, I think that the single line captions with the images stretched them to the max. Julie milked as much input and output as she could out of each caption and image and then bam there was another one.
But I still really like the idea of ParagraphTalk. Maybe it could work effectively at the upper levels.
One of the biggest challenges we face in this group is keeping on top of all the new ideas. We’re surfing the big crested waves here with big drop offs and that is why this work is so exhilarating. I know if I tried ParagraphTalk I would properly have a few gnarly wipeouts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We came to play.
When I say there can be reading in step 1 I don’t mean it’d be a lot.
If the structures were “wants,” “has,” “gives,” then after translation and gesture have been given, then kids could read:
“The teacher has coffee.
Lebron James wants the coffee.
The teacher gives Lebron the coffee.”
You could circle it a bit with the reading projected. You could try a little reader’s theater.
Then, you could underline the variables:
“The _teacher_ has _coffee_.
_Lebron_ wants the _coffee_.
The teacher gives _Lebron_ the _coffee_.”
And you storyask the blanks.
There is very little reading and lots of aural CI. I would only try this if I thought it helped kids understand the aural input. I think adults would definitely appreciate this as I’ve been told before they like to see the words.
Eric, I like this idea and will try it the next time I get the chance. That may not be for awhile though, because I’m on my every-other-year-off from school teaching (subbing and other misc work to stay afloat), but maybe I’ll get another group of adults soon. I can’t see how any fossilization that could occur would’t be remediated quickly with the loads of aural input you’re following it with.
I think Terry is right on about Chinese reading with beginning levels (at least 1 & 2; maybe CI-trained level 3 and up will be different). BUT I do show the students pinyin of new words as they are introduced. Characters in reading later, after sound-meaning is connected well in their minds. I tried a whole variety of approaches with Chinese reading for several years before hearing what Terry does.
But for someone like me, I’d love new words in characters and reading right away. So, I think would about 3 of my students in level 3 & 4 (not all of them). There’s enough of a character mindset & database to draw on.
Thanks Eric I had forgotten the point that Julie was doing PQA, not just working with some picture. She was setting up a story. Very badass way to do that. I love my right brain hippy style of PQA, but not everyone does and what Julie offered to the observing group was just so new and exciting.
Thanks for sharing this. This really helped with a question I had about having kids with various native languages. (Straight translation for 90% of the class (only) is fairly cruel to the remaining 10%)