Again, When the students are sitting there listening to PQA, it is like they are watching a still picture that we are adding details to. In PQA there is not a lot of cohesive action, where actual scenes unravel in our students’ minds. Everything is kind of static in PQA – the experience is like taking our students to a museum and showing them different non-moving objects.
When we do decide, usually on the spur of the moment there in the museum, to develop the PQA into little scenes, which I personally call “extending” PQA, we usually don’t extend it very far. Because if we do that (extend it very far), we find ourselves suddenly in a story.
Anyway, usually that kind of extending PQA into a story doesn’t work bc the story, being an extension of random CI (PQA), lacks pre-planned/targeted structures, and, for me at least, I don’t like to do stories that don’t have structures that I have gotten a lot of reps on first (they don’t work as well).
Compare this walking around the museum, with little extended scenes or not going on in there, with real stories, which is like leaving the museum and walking down the street with our classes to watch a real movie. The students now have a deeper, more compelling, set of images to relate to.
In the movie venue, facts and static images are replaced by action. The students want to know what is going to happen. This is big step. It is a whole new kind of comprehensible input, one that is more alive, one that has the potential to bring much greater interest. You know you are in this newer kind of CI when the students sit there and clearly could care less about anything except what happens next.
Sometimes, classes have ended and the kids don’t want to get kicked out of the movie theatre, as they were sitting there wanting to know what was going to happen next and realized that they had to go to their next class. That pisses them off and, when they walk out pissed, we know we have been doing good CI.
They sometimes start arguing among themselves about how that story would have ended if we had had the time to finish it. When we see them wanting to know what happens next, we learn something about this method that can’t be put into words.
Sometimes classes – the reallly good ones – actually rebel against too many details that I establish while circling a story into existence. They tell me that they really want to get some action going on, with less character description and details like that. They are so right to complain!
They want to see less trees and more forest! We should learn how to drive a story forward “through the trees” to an end point without sacrificing comprehensible input.
For me that means finding an entry path into a forest (the story) and following it through to the other side without getting distracted by too many details (trees). This finding an entry path is the challenge in learning how and when to move into a story from PQA.
Finding the entry path into the story is a big topic. It depends on what was said and which certain students got involved in the PQA and how and when and even if that information carries the potential to be married to the story which is waiting to become personalized (therefore real to the kids) on the stage of the classroom, as it were.
Yet I don’t like to be in a hurry with the PQA, because not enough PQA will make the story weak bc not enough reps were there to build a solid foundation for the story. This is an often forgotten main function of PQA – to get reps on the target structures so that the waiting story can be strong and interesting.
Some classes, anxious to get on to the story, have actually come up with a sign for “Speed Up!” to signal me when I fall into “the pit filled with the trees”. It is a whirling motion with a finger in the air. It is their message for me to move from details (PQA) to action (story).
So, as always, my students are my teachers, telling me to dump the details and get on with the story!
Of course, any comprehensible input is effective, but this flowing from the right amount of PQA into a story, at the right time, is something that we just have to get a lot of practice on. Going from Step 1 to Step 2 of TPRS is quite an adventure!