I’m going to put this up right now as a sticky post. I shouldn’t. It’s too long and there is too much happening here already. Most readers of this blog will be confused. I can’t help it. It will need some editing so forgive the mess. It’s like a chantier and it is just going to be messy for a week or so here, since there are three major new ideas I want to present here all within this one work week we are ending today:
1. jGA – already presented a few days ago – an important new concept in how we relate to people who attack our work with CI because it puts them on the defensive. Thank you beyond words, James, I think it is genius and more than merely important. It is something that has been needing to be written for decades, something that Blaine or Susie or the other experts could not have written. As Angie said so well, jGA is astoundingly clear and as she also said, in a paragraph that made me very happy to read because it sparkled so much, your four points in jGR remind us to become a part of the magical process of teaching language instead of picking it apart. It also opens up a can of Whoop Ass on those who attack us. Mace. Badass mace. Right on, my brother. Right on.
2. sBI – Sabrina’s Brilliant Insight. That article will post in the next few days as part of this new mess, but a critically important mess in my own view of what is happening on this site right now. (The airplane is picking up speed, so strap in and read well this month. We’ll land it in June and take off again in the fall for another rocky ride but an exhilarating one after some R & R in the summer conferences.)
3. cRD – read about it here in this article. In my view, this modified approach to reading novels is just huge.
I know it’s a mess, and I know that it won’t make sense to lots of people. I have been told that this blog space, this PLC, should be a clear training place for people who want to get better at CI. And I think it is, if the person is willing to dig, like Hosler. But you won’t benefit from this PLC unless you read carefully and fight through it. That is why it is for the few.
This space is not for lazy people. And I don’t like it when people take ideas from it and represent them as their own. Really, what this space was originally designed for was to be a place where I could work personally work out ideas about CI, which I do via writing.
It was meant to be a place to just try to organize some of a storm of new ideas about language teaching, a storm lasting years. So deal. If it’s too messy, go read somewhere else. This method doesn’t exist yet in any final form and it never will. Feel the pain and move on. Freak out in your class and then change. We have to organize it and form it all up for ourselves. That is why we keep the group small. There is no one method, and, if I may say so without sounding like a haughty ass, few can do this work we are doing.
OK – just had to get that off my chest. Here’s the new article. It, like much of what I write here, is too long. Get over it. I’m trying to understand things, and I learn by writing….
What is cRD, or “Compact” R & D? For me in my own R & D world, I have been going too fast in an effort to get through the nevels. Or novels. Take your pick. Maybe some can relate. Narrow and deep – good. Shallow and wide – bad.
I have decided to redefine and implement a brand new version of CI in my R & D instruction. As I stated above, this new idea is on the level of jGR, jGA, and sBI in terms of important new ideas here.
I hate to call it cRD, but what the hell, right? People are totally confused by all these acronyms already anyway and if James doesn’t bail us out on them over the summer with some nice flow charts we will get lost in the sea of acronyms that have overtaken this site anyway. (Hence the need for the new videos I am making, which are going to be a real challenge – how would you like to try to put everything you know about teaching onto video?)
Back to the point, Ben – the old R & D is dead for me. Or, I should say that, again just for me, and I am not trying to present this idea as some special new breakthrough, but as something important to me in how I read novels with my students in the future. In my world R & D has evolved into something different and I think for my students it is far better.
How do I know that? When I had the breakthrough class yesterday, right in the middle of class, they told me as much. I asked them if this was clearer and even kids who never spoke to me all said it was much clearer and easier for them to understand than the old way of reading novels.
So, in this new different way to do R & D, in simple terms, I just go nuts with about three verbs from the novel, using TPR and RT and PSA to a ridiculous degree to build an entire class around just those three verbs and those three CI strategies. That’s the basic idea.
It is very much like how my very successful change to doing just pure and focused PQA/PSA on two or three target structures on Mondays for an entire class period and not starting the story until Tuesday works.
Both my Monday PSA program to set up the story and my new approach to R & D are all connected to sBI and the simple yet genius recent blockbuster idea presented by Sabrina that our kids don’t get enough reps in the CI that we have been doing up until now (May, 2013) and so we must change to offer a much more compact and therefore impactful version of CI in our stories and novel reading if we are to get the results we want with novels.
Keep in mind while reading this that there have been two dominant schools of thought on how to read a novel in TPRS/CI circles over the past fifteen years – one has been to plow through the book. That has been the position of Susan Gross. Then there is Blaine Ray’s position of reading and discussing and going much slower, with lots of spinning out of text, building of parallel novels, etc.
In 2009 Blaine asked me which one I prefer and I said both. But I never married the two together until now, as expressed below. I do not think that Blaine’s idea was a good one by itself to read novels. It had the critical fault of requiring too much discussion in the target language and not enough reading. People – and I did this for years – would spend most of the class period spinning discussion off the text and reading through only a few pages of the text – a disaster, since reading in my mind is more important than listening in language acquisition.
Here is the link to the old (current) version of R & D – one that I consider weak, watered down, and too shallow and wide compared to the new version, if you need a refresher on that first:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/10/03/five-stages-of-r-and-d/
Still reading? Then you are a marine. A CI Commando. Let’s make hats for San Diego. With CI Commando on them.
So, among other things, in this more compact version of R & D:
1. I go slower. OK, that’s not new but I gotta say it and do it anyway. Gotta the walk the walk on SLOW.
2. The students need more time in quietude to read the passage before we translate it. In the old way, I would tell them to read the passage for ten minutes and then we would translate up to two pages all at once and that was just too much. I personally need to learn to cover much less text in class with my students. If I did this properly I would theoretically never need stories or anything else to get great language gains in my students – I could get them just from this new version of R & D alone. Narrow and deep, say it again. Narrow and deep, make it a chant.
So now what I do is make the entire class about no more than five lines of the text they read to start class, snowplowing through most of the text. In this new compact R & D, we would normally not even read a full paragraph – we would spend the entire class on about three or four verbs, and they would be the rebar for the entire class and nothing more. Just three or four verbs.
So they read it quietly and we then translate it – all of that can be done in five minutes to start class, and then – here is where the heavy lifting begins – we move into massive CI using three strategies we already use, but only on those three verbs. What are the three strategies? TPR, Readers Theatre and PSA.
Limiting the amount of text I cover and using those three existing CI strategies in my new version of R & D has the astounding result of raising reps from 50 to well over 200 in a class, reflecting and putting into practice Sabrina’s Great Insight – so new to us – that we need FAR more reps than we have hitherto thought for a structure to be acquired.
So let me restate this change in what I consider R & D to be in its most effective form:
1. We address much less text to start class, just one short paragraph that has action in it. Again, if the text lacks action and power, if it can’t be TPR’s very well and if it doesn’t lend itself to Readers Theatre and PSA, then we just snowplow through it and get it off the road and out of the way.
If it is a long paragraph then we break it into two pieces so that we are never dealing with more than three or four sentences at a time in this new kind of R & D class. We go line by line with this new form of R & D, which means that we truly go narrow and deep in this kind of CI.
2. As stated, the discussion thus would center around three or four verbs and no more. It could be as few as one or two verbs from one sentence only. This is important because it allows us to manufacture all sorts of situations in which we are able to get massive reps not just of the verb as written in whatever tense it occurs in in the text but also to create PSA where we can move into practice with other verb tenses.
3. As stated, doing this new R & D gives new meaning to the term “narrow and deep”. Currently, we only THINK we go narrow and deep in our R & D classes. If what Sabrina suggests is true, and I know it is and that is why I am boldly making these changes in the way I do R & D, then, by limiting the amount of text we read to just a few sentences in the new R & D format, we get to completely new levels of efficiency in our SLOW repetitions of the text in thousands and thousands of interesting ways, thus launching our students forward much further in one class than was possible with the old version of R & D, which I think many of us can agree was just too shallow and wide.
4. HOWEVER, and this would not come as a surprise, it’s got to be the right paragraph, one that clearly lends itself to RT or in some other way carries interest to allow lots of TPR.
5. To repeat an important point, in this new version of R & D we must snowplow through large amounts of less interesting text, because if we tried to do Compact R & D all the time it would take up to twenty years to read one book.
So, in this new version of R & D I just snowplow the boring parts of a chapter (Susie) and isolate and go crazy with the one or two paragraphs that lend themselves to RT and TPR and stuff like that (Blaine). As stated, I have always wanted to blend those two opposing approach to reading novels, which Blaine indicated to me, as I said, that he thought could never be blended into one reading approach – and so that is what Compact R & D does – it blends snowplow reading (through the parts of the novel that are just not interesting) with the narrow and deep compact reading of just one or two paragraphs per chapter as described in this article, and it does so in an effective way.
5. Obviously, to go narrower and deeper, we have to go line by line. I stated that before in this article. I am repeating a lot here because I learn by repeating things over and over until I get them. We have to be ready to spend up to a half an hour or more on one sentence if it is the right one, the one that has energy, the one that Jason Fritze would go off on in an RT tear as only he can. That sentence.
Clearly, Sabrina’s Brillian Insight has prompted a need for some of us now to go over much of what we have done with TPRS/CI and re-evaluate all of it in terms of the need for thousands and not hundreds of reps, so I am starting to do that here with R & D. This is just a starting point for a whole new kind of CI, a much more compact kind. The ideas presented here, I am certain, will apply to stories as well.
6.Sabrina’s great insight changes the entire equation of what some of us will do in this work, or at least that is my opinion. Put on your CI Commando hat. As I just said, but I need to repeat things, I would predict that the same kinds of changes that I am suggesting here for R and D will apply to stories – the scripts will be much shorter, there will be less than three structures, etc.
I have mentioned RT and TPR and PSA and how they will occur much more often as teaching strategies in this new version of R & D. PSA will be a big player in it as well. A big player. A really big player. Because PSA shifts the discussion from the text to one about the character in it to a student in the classroom, thus serving as a launching pad to even more interesting CI at just the right moment in class. So PSA should occur frequently in this new version of R & D.
Specifically, PSA takes over in the discussion when TPR and RT are exhausted. PSA is the tag team dude coming in the ring to take over the fight for his exhausted buddy at the right time. PSA functions as a second French horn on an extended note (like happens all the time in Wagner), taking over for the first French horn that has been holding the note for two full measures already so that the audience doesn’t even know that two French horns were involved in creating that one extended Wagnerian note. (Can you imagine? French horns in the service of German music? There is a God!)
Here is an example. On page 48 of Le Voyage de Sa Vie, the protagonist Jean-Luc is grabbed by the villain La Femme Insecte. The scene I would focus on lasts only three lines. It has only about four dominant verbs and is therefore perfect for a very compact R & D 53 minute class that is entirely focused on a few sentences. At some point in class, the tag team guy PSA will come in with great effect to spell TPR and RT (if RT even happened), and to bring in with it reps on another verb tense as well. How?
Here is the text in English:
…Jean-Luc cries “Thief!” in French and then in English and the old couple leaves discretely and quickly. The insect lady turns and approaches Jean-Luc. He can’t escape and she grabs his arm….
So now let’s do what we should always be doing when we teach using CI – focusing on, repeating, illustrating, demonstrating, TPRing, etc. the verbs. What are the verbs in this passage? Here they are:
- yells
- leaves
- turns
- approaches
- can’t
- escape
- grabs
That’s way too many verbs. So, first, I ask myself what they already know – yells, leaves, can’t, grabs – and I throw those out. That leaves me with:
- turns
- approaches
- escape
Three is all I can handle in one story, so why I should I try to handle more than three in an R & D class? I next notice that they are all pronominal. So that’s my lesson – a grammar lesson on pronominal verbs without once saying what a reflexive verb is (they never get it) or writing anything down. Finally, I’m teaching real grammar – correctly spoken French from which correctly spelled writing will emerge as long as everybody doesn’t get all jiggy with it too early, writing that can lay down in a nice rich bed of sound before coming to life on paper so that it’s not all ugly when it finally happens.
So the process is that the kids read the paragraph quickly, we translate it, all that in five minutes, and then off to the CI races with TPR as long as it goes, then some basic R & D about the text for major reps (“Who turns?” x 50 variations on that, etc.), then some nice PSA to parallel all the basic R & D questions, but where the kid with the good heart is willing to play the insect lady, and then, if it happens, some Readers Theatre for dessert, the sum of all those things together adding up to what I am calling in this article Compact R & D. All that could fill a block class but I do the best I can with a 53 minute class.
To say that again, the sequence of strategies for this new way of doing R & D is:
- the kids read the paragraph quickly
- we translate it
- TPR as long as it goes
- basic R & D
- PSA to parallel all the basic R & D questions
- Readers Theatre
Once we get to the PSA section, and Jasmine has indicated her willingness to play, she comes in as the insect lady. See what happens. Or don’t bring Jasmine in as the insect lady if it doesn’t feel right. Instead, ask Jasmine how she feels about what is happening to Jean-Luc. Just start asking questions using the verbs you have isolated:
- turns
- approaches
- escape
Ask her if she approaches boys. Ask her if the boys can’t escape. If RT happens and she and a Jean Luc boy are willing to get up and act, go for it. We have decided we are all becoming experts at RT in San Diego this summer. Use the Annoying Orange technique. Bring Jasmine totally in. Ask her all sorts of questions relating to the book.
Go wide with previously taught verbs if you want. Ask her if, when Jean-Luc returns to Denver, she will pick him up at the airport. Go wide, but use only verbs they already know. If you find yourself using the future tense and they are resonating with that particularly singular sound in the French language, hit them with a hundred future tenses.
Just don’t go too far from the original targeted verbs from the paragraph. Learn to sneak new verb tenses in whenever you can. If it feels like this is the time to learn to bring in the future tense (you know by how they respond), go for it. Unless you feel it’s not supposed to be taught at this level. Then you are buying the book lie. Overcome the book lie about when things should be presented. Go into some heavy PSA using the future tense. Live a little! The book police will not get you, because they are not real! Get mega reps on the verbs from the passage in the future tense if it happens. Go with the flow of the language. This is not a hippy statement. This is good pedagogy. Search the word FLOW on this site for more on that concept, a crucial one if you are to really get CI working for you in your classroom.
That has been a preliminary overview of this new idea.