Of course, when we talk about dumping PQA and making it an option, we are not talking at all about preparing for reading novels – just preparing for stories.
We don’t do PQA to prepare novels. When we prepare novels, we first do some stories in order to familiarize (not necessarily teach for acquisition) our students with the big dog verbs and such that they will find in the reading.
This has been the way of doing things in TPRS since the beginning – PQA was there to bring success in the stories, and the stories were there to bring success in the readings, because the entire system was to bring gains in reading, not aural understanding, which came along for the ride.
This is according to Dr. Krashen’s research and especially on his book The Power of Reading which in my opinion is an unmatched collection of research that shines the light on the most effective way to learn a language.
And everything in reading depends on what structures we choose to target. I tend to target only the really important structures and gloss the smaller ones. Others target more structures. It is all an individual thing for us.
Many of us, in order to deal with the ridiculous amount of time needed to prepare an entire novel – because there are too many words in it – have started preparing chapters and reading them and giving up on teaching an entire novel. Laurie suggested this hear about two weeks ago and it’s a great idea and I think many of us are doing it now.
An example of choosing targets to put in stories to teach a certain chapter in a book: in Brandon Brown Wants A Dog, I would target “he wants a dog” in the lead-in stories but “not as big as Clifford” because “as big as” can be glossed and only occurs in one paragraph of one chapter. I think Eric would agree with this. Otherwise we would have to do 50 stories to set up one very simple chapter of a simple book.
So scaffolding, which I define as:
- first setting up a reading via some stories.
- presenting the students first with some simple embedded readings of the ultimate end text (the chapter in the book)and then
- gradually “slotting” more and more words into increasingly complex versions of the end text so that the kids can easily read the desired chapter in the novel.
is a process that is really not mechanical but is kind of artful in that it relies on the choice of the teacher in terms of what they want to teach, what they want to extract from the novel in order to guarantee their students success on any particular chapter of a novel.
I remember that Diana Noonan would always respond to struggling teachers’ questions with the question “What are you trying to teach?” It really impressed me. Whenever I got screwed up in my own teaching, I would just ask myself that question and it always cleared everything up. If I answered that question to myself honestly, my students could always, at the end of the storytelling process, read what I wanted them to read.
So it is up to us to decide what words we want to teach in a chapter and then use stories and embedded readings to set up their success in the reading of the end text.
In the light of this definition of the scaffolding process, and the one above is from Linda Li this morning so thank you Linda, it seems that we don’t need to waste time doing PQA to set up a story, unless those target structures are important ones in the end text of the novel. It’s almost as if the storyasking process has hijacked the main goal of our work using comprehensible input – reading.