We just finished a complex discussion about a simple idea – that we must severely limit the use of Point and Pause if our fluency program is to be effective. What started the discussion was this from Leigh Anne:
…eliminating or nearly-eliminating Point and Pause, and only teaching the three structures will keep the slower learners feeling like part of the class, making the class stable, helping keep the kids calm further into the year, maybe up to the end of the year….
Below, I have collected some of the comments that arose in response to what Leigh Anne said. I think that not everybody may have read them, and, since I consider what is written below to be ultra important to our success this year, maybe some of the most important stuff we have discussed here ever, I am posting those comments below:
Point and Pause is when you clarify anything that they have never heard before. The use of Point and Pause should be extremely rare, because in an ideal story sequence there is never any new vocabulary being introduced. Otherwise, it is too hard for the students to grasp what is going on. But, whenever something entirely new to the students does creep into a story, we just go to the board, write it down, pause for about four or five seconds, and then continue on with the story. Whether it is a target structure or just something new doesn’t matter. Anytime we use go out of bounds, we use the Point and Pause skill. t is impossible, in the time given, to address and get repetitions on more than just a few structures. The optimum number seems to be 2 or 3 per hour or so. The brain mechanically needs to hear each of those structures, and no more, taught within a context that is interesting and if possible compelling and captivating to the learner. That’s the research as I understand it. By trying to add in new expressions, we ignore 20 years of experience in the field. Why would we do that? Even three structures is too much and people have moved down to two, like Laurie. I usually present three and then end up really teaching only two. That’s the way it works. That’s all we have time for. Point and Pause is nice for the really fast moving kids – it gives a wider scope to the discussion, But, as Leigh Anne says, slower kids – slower PROCESSING kids – just can’t handle all the new sounds. And that is what it is about, handling new sounds and being able to fit them into the overall sounds so that the unconscious process of building a language system in the deeper mind can occur.
Even if we go supremely slowly, we lose our students by creatively (in our minds only – it is a disaster for the kids) pointing and pausing to new words on the word wall or we just add them onto our increasingly messy board and expect that all the kids will hang with us.
When they don’t, and the class starts to fracture into all those shards in the first weeks of the year, we say that TPRS doesn’t work, but it is our own failure to limit the amount of incoming words. Each of those new non- targeted structure that we point to and pause at are like incoming materiel into a platoon of soldiers in a war – each is more than the soldier can handle – there are just too many overwhelming new sounds coming in too fast and the soldiers have no recourse but to hit the ground with their hands over their heads. I was the worst. I always just wrote the word haphazardly on the board wherever I could find room, at different angles, in corners, wherever I could find room. Very stupid move. Only the 4%ers got it. And since I was a 4%er, there we were back in collusion against the rest of the class, only using TPRS and not traditional methods this time. And I always wondered why it didn’t work and why my kids were so lazy.
All those years I did it. To the kids, it was like seeing their teacher draw a picture for them of scribbled nonsense all over the board and then telling them to make sense out of it. We all do it. We all confuse our kids in this way. But I can’t do it anymore because it confuses my kids.
Now this leads to a point of supreme importance. Don’t we NEED those words to further the lesson? I mean, it just seems impossible to teach them anything without those supplemenary words, right?
My answer is no. In fact, I say that it is impossible to teach a class using any new words. I am not talking about the question words. We use them and point with the laser or our hand all the time and that works just fine. I repeat – I am not talking about the question words.
We repeat the target structures over and over and over and over in different and interesting ways, never saying a single thing that doesn’t have at least one of the target structures in it, personalizing all the way, and we do so until we feel as if can’t say those targets one more time, and then we try to get another hundred reps on them. However, if we limit those all those randomly presented words now, and totally establish meaning on only the structures (this includes expressions like “plays football” in the Circling with Balls types of activities), then we move the learning to the level of true acquisition. The result is that, in the first few months of painful slow going, the train will begin to pick up genuine speed because it will have genuine moment, and soon it – the entire class – will be speeding along the tracks at a good rate of speed with all the cars (students) attached. Another image to describe that process of starting the year out at the right speed, the speed of a train starting up its engines and moving ever so slowly in the first minutes before it gets moving beautifully down the tracks later, is to think of an exponential curve.
With traditional teaching, there was no curve, the kids didn’t learn a thing. With TPRS, when we went too fast too early (this was called “diving right in”), the curve was a miserable kind of “wanna be” geometric curve but it didn’t go up like a real geometric curve, it was just a slight straight line upward until June with classes that never really worked together.
And we took that shitty geometric curve to be a big deal. We celebrated and tried to tell others about this great new method but other teachers would look at our kids and say, “They’re not that great!” and they weren’t, because so many of our kids spent the year with their faces planted in the dirt and their hands over their heads. Of course, that pissed us off because we were convinced that Krashen had indeed turned the language acquisition world on its heels and we so deeply wanted to prove that we’ve all become kind of nutty. But think of that exponential curve. It starts so slowly, you can hardly see it as different from the base line for a long time, and then suddenly a point of critical mass is reached and bang there it goes straight up. That is what limiting Point and Pause and really limiting extraneous words early on is going to do for us.
We are going to reach that point of critical mass and get the rocket ship effect if we can just limit the new stuff and stay properly in bounds for those first two or three months of the year until the train is rolling easily down the tracks. And yes, any English teachers out there, that is a mixed metaphor on three levels and so what? It works for me.
Let’s all echo what Diana told me (and I didn’t hear for two years until Leith Anne sprinkled a little stardust on this discussion yesterday) one more time: …you only use Point and Pause for the target structures…. Let’s chant it: …you only use Point and Pause for the target structures…. …you only use Point and Pause for the target structures…. …you only use Point and Pause for the target structures…. …you only use Point and Pause for the target structures…. …you only use Point and Pause for the target structures…. So your observation here is very accurate, skip: …it is weird how we do stuff for so long thinking it was what we were “taught” …but how, when pushed to think about it, IT JUST DOESN’T WORK!…. To conclude: I know that my own tendency to go all over the place has been the single reason my teaching has not gone to the next level over all these years. I would lose those kids who just were too dead in their lives because they had experienced things I don’t want to know about. Those kids, that 25% tp 35% who just act like they are waiting for a bus instead of wanting to learn French in an immersion setting because it’s fun, will be all be my barometers this year, and I will not blow this idea of reaching them. I think I can I think I can I think I can, to extend the train image.
Those kids are literally going to have to show up in my classes this year where they didn’t in previous years. Why? Because the class is going to be so absurdly clear and easy to understand – clear to the nth degree – that they HAVE to be a part of the action.
This is what Leigh Anne was talking about in terms of those first few months when they would be lost bc of that splitting process into those who want to process (some people call them fast processors) and those who don’t want to process (some call them slow processors).
I feel that I can avoid that splitting of the class by not sending in so much materiel with all that accompanying shrapnel and the fast processors will literally turn on their soldier buddies with their heads buried on the ground under their arms and say, “Hey, it’s not that bad, we can handle this incoming. Pick up your head and do what you are supposed to do.” So the real answer about how I am personally going to respond to this new knowledge, the Leigh Anne Principle in TPRS, is that I am just going to SEVERELY LIMIT my use of any new words. I am not going to use Point and Pause except for the targeted structures, but I will break that rule maybe once or twice in each class. Maybe four times. You get the idea.
Nathan added a practical idea at this point in the discussion: You know, reading and re-reading through the posts on the topic of limiting ourselves to the target structures has reminded me of a technique that Michele and I have been talking about in preparation for teaching distance learning this upcoming year. In my school’s distance learning lab I don’t have the luxury of teaching in front of a whiteboard very easily, so I took to grabbing three mini-whiteboards and put my daily target phrases on those. That way whenever I used the term, I could hold up the mini-whiteboard to the camera to reinforce the meaning, sort of like subtitles to my audio track. One side effect of this is that it forces you to stick to those terms unless you want to be juggling a host of mini-whiteboards all period. I probably should start doing this a bit in my normal classes as well to resist the temptation to keep adding new words.
So on my big board each day I’ll have my target phrases written in a section labeled “Zielwoerter” (target words) and have matching mini-whiteboards sitting in the marker tray for uses as subtitles. When I start walking around and working the room, I’ll take the little boards with me. If I do write additional words on the board I’ll limit myself to words they already know and park them in a section labeled “Wiederholung” (review). I’m pretty sure that I need built-in structural reminders to keep me in-bounds, and I think this might help.