You take a chapter from the novel and, going paragraph by paragraph, you do the following:
1. the students read the paragraph silently or translate with a partner if they can handle that.
2. you read it aloud while they read it silently. (loudly and slowly – this marinates the content for later).
3. you and the group chorally translate the paragraph (loudly and slowly).
4. you discuss the facts in L2, with no grammar explanations. Just a simple discussion of the facts.
5. you get a parallel character, telling the kids that you are going to publish the novel they create in May. This main character has to be a kid who shows up everyday, who is of good cheer, who has the right “vibe” to be the hero.
6. Going back to the paragraph you are reading, you use the questioning process to start gathering parallel details. In one of my classes, a girl named Janet loves her new identity as a Mexican girl who lives in France. You get the parallel novel by starting from the text, saying that Anne is American, but what is Janet? If Anne has five people in her family, how many are there in Janet’s? If Anne has blue eyes, what color are Janet’s eyes? In one class, I learned from this kind of “parallel questioning” that Anne is Mexican, lives in France, has 33 people in her family (my 10th pd. class), of whom 13 are boys and brothers and 10 girls are sisters with 9 dads and 1 mother. First they said four mothers but then a few students thought about that and we settled on one mother. Janet has red eyes. We go on and on, developing our own novel. Certain quiet kids all of a sudden want to be Janet’s big brother, uncle, whatever. Identities are quickly handed out. The personalization mojo takes off.
7. As each new fact is created by the class, you write out each new sentence and send everything from your keyboard onto the screen through the LCD (you can then save the story for publication as the eventual novel). This of course is great for reading, but I notice a lot of kids really studying the text as it appears on the screen. They are not aware of it, but they are learning how to write.