Of course, a typical week of CI for most of us changes weekly as we learn more and more about comprehensible input possibilities with each class. But this very wealth of options presented to us by what Krashen started can cause confusion and a certain sense of being scattered in our lesson planning. Too much good information!
Personally, I only want to use those activities that are most effective for me, so I am not so scattered. In addition, I am designing my weekly instruction to reflect an increasing personal need for simplicity.
To repeat – I only want to use what is most effective and what is most simple for me. Here is what that week now looks like:
Monday – Story – either from a Matava script or generated by the kids. Students generate scripts in class according to the following instructions:
1. I teach them two or three base structures from a list of needed base expressions, the common structures that I most want them to learn that year. Two recent structures from one story are “likes to paint” and “at the end of”. Two minutes on that.
2. Students – in groups of six or seven kids per group of 35 – create a story script using two of the base expressions, but include any other weird expressions that they would like to learn as well. Their instructions are to generate, within a period of less than three minutes or less, a script of three to four sentences in which some character wants, tries, needs something, makes an attempts to achieve that, fails, then tries again and succeeds. But those instructions are extremely loose. An example of how the structures mentioned in (1) above were used by one group is:
There was a girl who likes to paint rainbows. She tries to paint a rainbow black. A leprechaun at the end of the rainbow is upset about that, and took her to the end of the rainbow and dug up a pot of gold there and gave her some gold coins. The girl painted the rainbow pink.
3. I take each one as it is finished and quickly scan it for quality. The best one is chosen. If possible, I include information from other scripts into the class. The above is not a polished text, and did not completely follow the instructions given about how to write a student generated script. It nevertheless showed great potential in characters and events and turned out to be a great story. It even led to a discussion about what there is at the end of my students’ own rainbows. So it moved up the taxonomy quite well, included a variety of verb tenses, and made for a high interest class with questions like “Why do you think the girl wanted to paint the rainbow black?” in which all the colors and a lots of other parts of speech were used (“Where was the girl, above or under the rainbow?” “How was it possible for her to reach the rainbow?” etc.) The main point, however, is that this story was generated by kids on Saint Patrick’s Day, and so held their interest more than a story that I could have provided.
4. An advantage for the overworked CI teacher in the above plan is that the teacher need not even prepare by picking out a story script and hoping it works, or writing one as some of us do. All that is needed to plan classes using student generated stories is a few commonly occurring and important target structures. It makes for less work.
5. We begin the CI as usual. Students are allowed to speak English in only two cases – after I ask, “What does ____ mean?” or after “What did I just say?”
6. Quick quiz at end of class.
7. My focus as we develop the story is on five things:
- SLOW
- Speaking NO English
- Teaching to the Eyes
- Using only the written skill of Point and Pause – not spoken L1 – to clarify meaning
- Allowing no one, not one single student to lose contact with my eyes and the flow of the story (this is actually possible if the above four skills are properly done).
Tuesday – Reading – if necessary, we read Blaine’s novels, but, most often, I write at the end of the day on Monday a composite story from the five classes on Monday. This can and should be embedded, although time is an issue here. Of course we use the read and discuss technique for the reading class. Here is the story – a composite of ideas from two classes – that was written for Tuesday about the girl and the leprechaun. It is lengthy but provides the idea. It could be embellished and embedded, of course, if I wanted to include some other review vocabulary (as per Toni Walton), but this is what Jennie, who was visiting from Alaska that week, and I wrote during our planning period. Of course this text was written for all five of my classes, because trying to write five would be simply too much work
C’est la fête de Saint-Patrick, mercredi le dix-sept mars. Il y a un garçon qui s’appelle O’Reilly. Et ce garçon, c’est un femmelette, c’est à dire qu’il est timide et faible. Ce n’est pas une fauve. O’Reilly veut sortir avec une fille.
Il voit une jolie jeune fille qui peint un arc-en-ciel noir. La fille aime peindre les arcs-en-ciel. Elle n’aime peindre ni chats ni chiens. Elle préfère peindre les arcs-en-ciel. Pourquoi aime-t-elle peindre les arcs-en-ciel? Parce qu’elle ne croit pas à la légende, qu’on trouve une grande tasse d’or au bout d’un arc-en-ciel. Elle pense, par contre, qu’on trouve les hippopotames multicolores au bout des arcs-en-ciel. Elle aime bien les hippopotames, mais elle n’aime pas l’or.
O’Reilly regarde la fille, et il lui dit, “Coucou, Sexy. Tu peux me donner ton numéro?” Mais la fille refuse. Elle lui donne plutôt le numéro de son footballeur préféré, qui s’appelle Zidane. Elle lui dit, “C’est le dix.” O’Reilly est très heureux parce qu’il croit que le dix est son numéro de téléphone. Mais le numéro dix, ce n’est pas son numéro de téléphone, c’est le numéro de Zizou, le grand footballeur français, qui est fameux parce qu’il a peint son front sur la poitrine d’un footballeur italien qui le chariait, et qui a été expulsé sur carton rouge pour un coup de tête au thorax de Marco Materazzi à l’occasion de la finale de la Coupe du Monde de mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-huit []. C’est une légende, lui.
La fille qui peint l’arc-en-ciel s’appelle Ulla. Et quand elle voit O’Reilly, qui lui dit “Coucou, Sexy,” elle pense qu’il est moche. À ce moment elle voit, à l’autre bout de l’arc-en-ciel, un hippopotame bleu clair qu’elle aime bien.
Ulla dit à O’Reilly, “Toi, tu es un perdant.” O’Reilly lui offre des pieces d’or, mais elle refuse parce qu’elle s’intéresse plutôt aux hippopotames bleu clairs. Ulla n’est pas riche en argent maintenant, mais elle est riche en imagination.
Wed/Thurs – repeat process above
Fri – time writing, SSR, dictation, K-Day, one word images, word chunking, poetry, music, film. Backwards design on certain poems or songs if time.
[Note: I grade less and less. This week I am trying out dictation as a means of addressing tardies, a short five minute dictee to start class. Kids late get a zero on that quiz grade if the tardy is unexcused, which most are. I grade that on a rubric of ten as described on my site at benslavic.com/resources/workshop handouts. I give quick content quizzes on stories and readings at the end of class. Most (50% – 70%) of the students’ grades comes from participation grades. I feel strongly within my rights, in a class that is all about reciprocal/participatory interaction, to grade in that way. I do not feel that I must justify my grades with lots of numbers. In fact, I feel that doing such assessment drains me and bogs me down in a cycle of overwork that is in fact rarely an honest reflection of what my students are doing for me in the classroom, and only serves to make everyone tired. Other grades come from freewrites (sometimes called timed writings), rare student self-evaluations as per Donna Tatum-Johns, but that is about it]