[This is really Look and Discuss made into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with PQA, two twin strategies, but I am calling it a new kind of PQA because it a) targets structures to set up a story, b) asks for the personal opinions of kids about various topics and brings their own lives in as well, c) brings strong output which may not happen in L and D.]
I’m especially interested in the Power Point slides Julie used in her class, how they are organized, the order of presentation of target structures and the personalized questions. This is not random. That is perhaps why Julie’s 6th and 7th graders, so brand new to abstract thinking, responded so much more strongly to her questions in class: they could see everything as she worked her way in the class through 43 slides. The captioned pictures added a lot of “pop” to the class.
All she did was PQA, but PQA that they could see. The questions were more personalized than PQA without images and captions, because they were more concrete and therefore more easy to relate to by the students, who could then more easily talk about their personal preferences. Of course, this made the PQA less bizarre (because the images limited the scope of where the PQA could “go”. This could be considered a drawback, but I think that the stability thus brought into the class outweighed that drawback, esp. with middle school kids. Would we rather present a more accessible class or a more bizarre class?
The order of the slides was crucial. Julie first presented only one verb, lleva/ carries/takes. Then she supported it with lots of interesting slides that sparked output.
Julie of course followed the general pattern of the first step of TPRS. She:
1. told the kids what “lleva” means with a few Waldo slides (presenting it in both 3rd and 1st person, which led to more output during the discussion of the slides);
2. gestured it (“Show me lleva”);
3. (this is the new powerful part I have not seen – she just starts going through a lot of the slides with personalized questions about them and their captions with the verb “lleva” in each slide. That is the part that rattled my view of what PQA can be. (I’m not saying we dump everything we know about PQA now, just pointing out that there are more ways to do PQA than what we have known up to this point.)
I’m still working on writing up everything I saw. But let’s take this one thing at a time. Let’s review: what Julie did was to use Power Point slides with captions to enable middle school kids to SEE and READ the questions. This reflects what Rudolf Steiner says about the capacity of 12 and 13 year olds to process information (12/13 – concrete sequential; 13/14 – burgeoning ability to think abstractly and interpret differently).
For me that is the breakthrough part of what Julie did. She did not just start asking random PQA questions about the targeted structure with nothing for the kids to anchor the new sounds on. That has proven to be a real challenge up until now for both the teacher (most teachers anyway – there are teachers who can do that effortless with no visual support) and that kind of purely sound based PQA has certainly been a challenge for most students, who have been trained visually for years in all their classes and then suddenly find themselves in a language class where their teacher looks at them, expects them to respond to a class full of SOUNDS, to even be graded on how well they can process that sound as per jGR, etc. and that is a stretch for a lot of kids. They want to know where the worksheets are.
So the images and captions also guide Julie in her own questioning and keep her on the target verbs as well, and by often using classroom vocabulary and previously acquired words, as per recent discussion here, she keeps everything visible. She anchors sound with visual aids. (That is why I tout word walls and word associations in my own classes so heavily, because we need nouns and verbs AND adjectives and adverbs or it’s boring all year). I mean, what’s a class without some nice fresh adverbs and adjectives to keep things at a higher level of interest?)
So now we can at least get a preliminary idea of what Julie did in her class Wednesday. She took into consideration the intellectual development of her specific students (Steiner); she created slides that anchored everything in class; the pictures and captions brought remarkable stability to the PQA session (whereas for fifteen years I personally did PQA with neither captions nor pictures); she still followed to the letter the tripartite order of Step 1 of TPRS: establishing meaning, then gesturing, then asking personalized questions; then she proceeded to knock that classroom instruction that day right out of the park using images and captions while at the same time coaxing from almost all her students a ton of output because the images and captions anchored the kids’ own self-expression so well, giving them confidence. Ten word sentences from first and second year middle school students were common that day.
So is this a revolutionary new kind of PQA? I don’t know. New things are being done each week in this work. I’m sure there is a way to deliver images and captions during a PQA class with a more advanced technology. In fact, Mary Overton who was there on Wednesday said as much but I can’t remember what she said. Those new DPS teachers downtown are rapidly upping the TPRS game, that’s for sure.
(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.)
[ed. note: Visual PQA was pioneered by Carol Gaab. The term was invented by Ruth Fleishman.]