This activity was first posted here years ago but I think a lot of us have forgotten it. Thinking about the need now in January to be able to pace ourselves for the grueling winter run, I republish it here. It definitely takes the pressure off.
One Word at a Time Stories (OWATS)
It is a fact that when we teach using comprehensible input, grouping students rarely works. We are the only person in the classroom who knows the language and our students should be receiving as many instructional minutes as possible from us in the form of comprehensible speech or reading as possible.
However, there are a few successful ways to practice writing. Dr. Robert Patrick has invented one which works best at upper levels but can be used also at lower levels. It is called OWATS – One Word at a Time Stories.
Dictée and free writes and this activity are the only three writing activities I personally recommend for CI classrooms. They help students transfer onto paper language that has been programmed into their unconscious minds during their journeys around the star via tableaux, stories and reading, and that is why they work.
Other writing strategies fail to connect the process of writing to the unconscious mind and that is why they fail.
Writing must emanate from the unconscious mind if it is to be authentic. Krashen has spoken to this point in his Monitor Hypothesis. When the conscious analytical left brain faculty is in charge of the writing, all it can do is try to apply a few learned or memorized rules to structuring the language.
It is like a dog trying to reason with an adult. The dog – the conscious mind – can’t process at the level needed for language to be acquired. Only the adult – the unconscious mind – can do it.
Dr. Patrick explains:
“With One Word at A Time Stories, I work backwards from a story or reading that I want my students to eventually read, some text that they haven’t see yet. I identify the new words in it. In one story I could see that there were 21 words or phrases that they either didn’t know or were not very familiar with.
“However, since it is a rather common requirement in language departments that students learn words from a list, this activity can be used for that purpose as well, but it is best when used to front load vocabulary for a real purpose like reading a Latin fable instead of just learning the word because it exists in a list.
“I put the words into a table using a large font and cut them out as cards., the Latin in large font with English in small font underneath it. Remember, these were new words/phrases.”
Here is what the students need to know before beginning the activity:
- Each group will receive a word. (An option here is to let them choose their word from the table and return them when they are done.)
- Working together on one sheet of paper with a pencil, they are to write one good sentence using that word.
- When done, they call me over to approve the sentence. If there is a problem, I explain it and then give them another word – or they go get one from the table – from which to craft another sentence.
- That next sentence has to begin to make a story based on the first one.
- The process continues: they write a sentence, call me over, receive any pop up grammar help, and then a new word, and a new (third) sentence to advance the story.
- When I run out of words to hand out, they find their next word from another group and give them one of theirs.
- With 5 minutes left in class I tell them that with their next sentence or two, they should bring their story to a surprising end. This is the one piece of the process I do not preview for them. This last instruction about writing a surprise ending is a surprise itself. That does not give time for overthinking and adds energy to the process at the very end.
- I collect the stories and type them into a PowerPoint. The next day, we read the stories together.
Use OWATS with shorter texts, and avoid using it to read, for example, the entire chapter of a novel. It can only work with shorter texts like fables, etc.]
Dr. Patrick observes:
- Students are very excited about this work. It is like asking a story but in a much smaller group, and each student has more control over the story. This work is COMPELLING.
- Because they only receive (or chose from the table) one word at a time, we ESTABLISH MEANING and keep the work SLOW.
- Because I do this with more advanced students, the STRESS over language production is rather LOW.
- They get individual attention from me on anything they are not clear about. The work remains COMPREHENSIBLE.
- GRAMMAR/STRUCTURAL questions can be asked and answered in a way that is not painful for both teacher and students.
- The students naturally begin to repeat the use of new words in subsequent sentences. So, in this activity
there is much REPETITION. On the next day, reading and discussing the stories provides more COMPREHENSION. The stories remain COMPELLING because the students not only get to see their story on the “big screen” but others students’ stories as well. - The teacher has fun! Imagine a group of students excitedly asking questions about how the language works, and all we have to do is walk around the room.
- I shared this with a colleague who teaches a “trailer” course of Spanish 2 students who all failed last year. He tried this same activity with them but only with words they had already been introduced to. He said it went over extremely well and that his most struggling students managed to put together a nice story.
The process, establishing the meaning of each word, keeps things SLOW, is compelling, provides repetitions, can create embedded readings from the bottom up, and involves backward design.
Don Read says about OWATS:
“I did the OWATS exercise with my French 1 (7th grade) and French 2 (8th grade) classes. Big success! I used 24 words chosen from the 200 Most Common/High-Frequency Word list. (I had given the 8th graders the list and I had asked them to identify the words they didn’t know.) I used the same words for both grades.
“All the groups produced 5-6 sentence stories. The 8th grade stories were better than the 7th grade stories, but all were good!
“All classes and almost all students were very engaged. And I was rushing around from group to group giving them the new words! One student said that it was really fun and we need to do this again. Yay!”
Laura Cenci says:
“I did the OWATs activity and the kids LOVED it. Thank you so much Bob for sharing this activity! My students really want to make their own stories. Giving them the focus of the cards, plus the lists on the walls, kept them in bounds. Letting them group with their friends allowed them to use their own micro-personalized clique-styles, but they’re using vocabulary that the other groups were using too. So tomorrow when we share, everyone will understand the story and get to enjoy the uniqueness of other groups’ special stories, while getting the opportunity to show off their own.”
Obviously this is one to avoid doing at the beginning of the first year, but when a class is ready, remember it. Like dictée, it gives the kids a break from the intense listening they do so much in class and they get to work in groups as well, working together to create something while having fun in the process.