Most of us have been doing a lot less reading than auditory input in the form of PQA, Extended PQA and stories. It’s just that way at the beginning of the year. Especially if it’s a level 1 course, right? WhY?
Because the kids need to have heard the language a bit before they can begin to read it. I am trying this year to get to 60% reading CI and 40% auditory CI in a typical week. Why?
For me, it’s simple – my kids just plain need to read a lot more. Last year it seemed like it was almost all stories, that’s my fun thing to do, and this year I have the same kids in level 2, so to balance out all the stories I need to get them reading more this year in level 2.
I asked Krashen about this directly when he observed me last year. I asked if he thought it crazy to do nothing but auditory input (no reading) for the entire first year. He didn’t hesitate to agree.
I couldn’t tell what his brain did in that split second before agreeing, but I think it possible that on some level he made the calculation that in level 1 kids get only about 125 hours of actual auditory input so why go nuts with the reading (DPS wants 50%) in year 1?
I am inclined to go with very little reading in year 1 in favor of PQA and stories and then go kind of batshit with the reading in level 2, and for me that is that 60% reading (or more) and 40% auditory in level 2, as I mentioned above.
There is another reason to want to do more reading and discussing. A lot of us know that when the going during a story gets rough, and we just feel blah, we can always bail to a dictée or a quiz, but another bail out move is to a book – that is to say, a novel.
Teaching using comprehensible input from a book is much easier than teaching using comprehensible input in the form of PQA or a story. The book just needs to be slightly below their level, and the irony of that is that only plenty of preparatory stories and Step 3 readings (connected to stories – not novels) can set up and guarantee success in the natural reading of novels. So, in what we do, speech input really does precede reading input.
Anyway, doing Read and Discuss is definitely an option now in this tough month of October. If you haven’t been doing stories long enough, and you want a bail out move that is not dictation, do R and D.
Maybe we can follow up on this idea a bit in the comment fields below. Read and Discuss rocks. It’s not so dramatic and wonderful as stories , but it gets the job done and gives you plenty of reading and auditory practice with circling and the questioning technique, which you can expand into PQA by asking the students questions comparing them with the characters in the book and thus play the PQA game, even with little extended scenes happening.
The hardest part of Read and Discuss is keeping the PQA auditory input down to a minimum in favor of spending the minutes on reading.
So for those of us who want to get more reading CI into our fluency programs, or if anybody just wants an October break from the intensity of the spoken CI process, I vote that we make October Read and Discuss (R and D) month.
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