Here is an edited and updated post from 2012 on R and D:
We can personalize R and D of novels just by asking a student a bunch of questions that parallel the information we are reading. This is not a new statement, just a reminder to myself to remember to do that in R and D.
So if Brandon in the novel drives a blue T-Bird and picks up Marianne at five thirty to go to the Café du Jour, I ask a student during the D part of R and D what he drives and whom he goes out with (a girl in class) and what time he picks her up to go to what restaurant. All of a sudden we are talking about an imagined date (never go real) of one of our students, and we have the vocabulary to do it because it is still fresh and right in front of the kids right there in the text about Brandon getting ready for his date. Instant personalization of the content of the chapter in the novel. Again, nothing new there but some of the newer people may not have heard of this simple trick to get the kids more into the reading by turning them into parallel characters to the ones in the novel.
What is new to me is that I used to think that parallel novels meant that I had to create an entire novel from the one we were reading, with parallel plots and all sorts of details. But now I am belatedly starting to see that whenever I am doing R and D of a novel with a class, I could be doing that sort of PQA with the kids to create not necessarily with the goal of creating a parallel novel, but just throwing out some parallel light banter when the paragraph we are on lends itself to that, and extending it for a minute or twenty depending on much energy it has.
It’s so easy to use R and D on novels. It’s really the ultimate bail out move and I use it much more now than I did a few years ago. It is perhaps the simplest form of CI available to us and I think all people new to the method should start with it and use it a lot before starting in with stories.
Once I had a story ready to go, didn’t quite have the energy level needed for it, passed out the novels (Robert calls them chapter books, more accurately), we read together, translating chorally into English, I popped up a little grammar, we then discussed each few lines or paragraphs together in L2, and (the new part – for me – described above) I just asked a superstar to make up some cute answers to parallel questions from just a few paragraphs.
It was cool bc there was no pressure in this, the pressure to create a “parallel novel” like it’s some big deal. Maybe we should not call them parallel novels, but just parallel questioning. We don’t have to create a whole new novel – that takes up much more time than we have during a week anyway.
I always wondered why I never did parallel novels. Now I know – it was too daunting in my mind. Like Robert said in his synopsis of RT yesterday, the first thing he said in that list was “RT is an occasional activity – there should be only one or two scenes per book that are acted this way.” We should perhaps learn to fear the terms RT and Parallel Novels less by keeping in mind that we have control over what we do and there is a lot less to learn here in this work than we think. Bringing five sentences to life in a novel is all RT is, and it could last a minute or twenty, and the same is true of parallel questioning in novels.
I will do a lot more parallel questioning when doing R and D with novels now that I have figured this weird little detail out, that I don’t have to create a parallel novel. And since after the break we are moving into the tough months of the year when stories normally are in full swing until we start reading more in the spring (at least that is what I do), we should remember that if the stories aren’t working, we can do simple R and D of chapter books with the kids, with or without parallel questioning, knowing that there are few more effective ways to teach them the language. What is better than stories in comprehension based instruction? Reading.