Anyone working with kids who think that making a mistake is a big horrible egregious thing, here is an interesting story from a teacher – who is not in the PLC – in Japan. We were talking via email about how to reach Japanese kids and this teacher said:
“The PSA tactic makes a lot of sense, and will be a necessity in most classes filled with girls afraid to speak out and be different, or for heaven’s sake, wrong… and every question has to have a right and wrong answer right? Well, that’s what memorizing answers to questions has taught them.
“I wanted to share my first ‘experiment’ with PQA. I have read a lot of your books and gathered a general idea to the approach (still need to solidify a lot of things obviously). So I decided to try this with a girl I tutor after school because she’s going on an exchange to California next year. She’s a very shy girl, and I’ve been trying everything to break her shell.
“Without any particular structures in mind, I just started with the statement, ‘There was a girl.’ I circled that. She has a lot of English knowledge, so as long as I wrote things down and pointed, I was pretty sure she could understand almost anything I said. So I just started asking loads of questions, circling, and if she drew blanks, I made statements to create a story. The story, so far, is below. She was able to recall almost every detail at the end of our 50 minute session. It was the first time I heard her talk consecutively for more than a minute.
Story:
There was a girl name Huka. She went to Tokyo Disneyland for Spring vacation. She wanted to meet Mickey Mouse, but he wasn’t there. She met Mickey’s cousin, Pedro Mouse. Pedro Mouse is from Mexico. He only speaks Spanish. He is pink, and only 3 centimeters tall. He came to Tokyo on a sea gull named Maurice. Maurice is a Mexican immigrant from France. He has two brothers and fifteen sisters. The sisters are very noisy and they love baguettes. Maurice ran away to Mexico because his sisters are too noisy, and he loves tacos. One brother lives in Italy, and the other brother lives in South Africa. The brothers started a family airline business. They carry only mice. It cost Pedro 256 tacos to fly to Tokyo, and took 20 days, 4 hours, and 22 minutes.
Pedro Mouse went to visit Mickey Mouse, but Mickey went to the Disney Sea in Florida. There must have been a problem with the eel-mail…
“That’s as far as we got, and I know I didn’t do the process correctly, but we still kept CI going for 50 minutes, and she learned a lot of new words and structures through that exercise. She actually smiled and enjoyed herself a lot too. It was funny at first when I asked her a question about a statement. She gave me a really worried look like she didn’t know the answer. Once I accepted her first answers, she understood she maybe did know the answers. That’s when I started rejecting them for more interesting ideas.
“Anyway, it was a fun first attempt. I translated the questionnaire to Japanese yesterday, and plan to give that to my first and second year students. Our school year just started, and I just want to enjoy it with everyone.
“Thanks again. I’ll continue devouring everything I can on your site and in your books.”
Cheers,
N
I responded:
I would like to share this with my group. This story is significant in that you are teaching the girl that being right is not the goal, but communication is. That is huge.
…she learned a lot of new words and structures…
Do limit the new stuff. The concept you want to have in this work is that your sentences to her should each contain at least one of the target structures. If not you’re out of bounds and that is not o.k. The gains we make are the results of our staying on the structures. All the other words are incidental and will go into or out of her new language system depending on a natural order of acquisition, one over which we are not in control, as per Krashen.
This is awesome:
…she was able to recall almost every detail….
This is also important:
…it was the first time I heard her talk consecutively for more than a minute….
This was clearly unforced. She spoke over a minute. You didn’t make her. It was not something you initiated by some trick of instruction, some lesson plan, something YOU did. Unforced output, a desire to express oneself in the TL, can only happen when there has been plenty, a flow, a cascade, a river, a cloudbank, of previous comprehensible input. You see the results of this here. You want to stymie speech output in a person? Plan it.
In general, if in those 50 minutes you didn’t use her L1, you pretty much knocked this one out of the park.