Dear Ben,
This is just to share how nice was to work with Anne Matava’s scripts. I have been battling for a month in this ‘hard core’ secondary school with plenty of bad boys and girls, constrained by a very narrow curriculum involving study of at least three different tenses and tons of not frequent and useless vocabulary… I have done a lot of OWI [One Word Images] and today I decided to go off curriculum and do my first story with the Year 10 Spanish. Since we are preparing for the GCSE and studying the theme of tourism and holidays, I decided to use ‘The Dirty Room’.
Students responded fantastically well, I had plenty of cute and sometimes ‘naughty’ answers from this bunch of teenagers full of hormones! We only managed to tell the first location of the story and it goes like this:
“Era la historia de una chica que se llamaba Gertrudis. Gertrudis tenía 74 años, pero estaba muy en forma. Un día viajó a España y fue a Barcelona para encontrar un novio joven. Gertrudis encontró a un chico de 17 años que era muy guapo y que estaba muy en forma también. Cuando lo encontró, lo besó apasionadamente y entonces fue al hotel con él. Cuando llegó, había un problema en la habitación. La habitación estaba sucia, tenía una cama muy pequeña y también tenía cucarachas. Era horrible, entonces el novio se escapó y Gertrudis lloró.”
It was terribly funny, the student actors were boys because the girls were too shy. It was hilarious. All super engaged. 100% in Spanish. They used rejoinders like ‘qué caliente’ and ‘super hot’.
Later during the day, I met several students in the canteen or in the corridors and they were all saying: ‘Hola Mrs. Pérez, remember Gertrudis?’ And there we were laughing all over again!
I cannot wait to meet them on Monday and I just wanted to share the little magic that TPRS has brought into my class. Thank you, thank you for the stories!
Cheers,
Margarita
I asked Margarita for a little background as well so we can get to know her a little bit better:
I studied languages and linguistics and worked as a researcher in educational sciences for a number of years before changing careers to become a language teacher last year. In 2013, I enrolled in a PGCE and ‘learned’ how to teach languages following the PPP (Present-Practice-Produce) approach which I found utterly boring and struggled for about 6 months with drills, grammar explanations and forced output. As the year progressed, I read more and more about Second Language Acquisition and found that to achieve high levels of competence in an L2 students need exposure to massive amounts of input. Clearly what I was doing was wrong and Google helped me to go from Krashen, to TPR, to TPRS, to Blaine, and to you and the PLC! I read, read, read and tried successfully simple stories and a couple of MovieTalks during the last month of training which gained me outstanding assessments from external observers. With TPRS and CI in the bag, I started the school year in a new school in a deprived area, with plenty of bad boys and naughty girls, working with lower sets with special needs ranging from ADHD to ASD. I work now in a school were all teachers believe that practices makes perfect, students are exposed to zero input but to a lot of grammar drills… How sad is that?
For four weeks I have been doing a lot of OWI with some success, I’ve tried but struggled to do PQA, but most of the time I am dealing with appalling behaviour and crying after school. On Wednesday, I decided to go off curriculum and do a story with one of my best groups. I expected that no administrator would enter the classroom! At the beginning the students were puzzled and silent, they failed to engage with cute answers, so I asked them to stand up and come near me. Then all happened in a second: “¿Es la historia de un chico o de una chica? Wow! And it worked and it was fun, and the students didn’t want to leave the classroom. Something difficult to describe happened on Friday morning period one that will stay with me for a long time.