Marc commented on the prezi.com post today:
Marc Sheffner 11.05.10 at 7:14 PM
“Thanks for posting this, Ben. It helps me address a dilemma/problem I’m facing with regard to PQA. (I don’t understand what prezi.com is or how to use it; I don’t use any IT in my language classes, it just gets in the way). I recently wrote it about on the tprs.jp forum, with reference to your blog post. My problems are a) how to unearth interesting material from the students, b) how to circle this material in 90-min. classes with college students who have zero tolerance for anything NOT about THEM (and that includes movies), c) how to find and use material that is both interesting for the students AND me! d) how to keep student-generated material from being totally unstructured – otherwise I spend the whole time just translating into English the things they want to say.”
Here is the beginning of a response to him:
Marc I’m with you on the technology point. It’s not that I don’t think prezis are just about the coolest thing to come along for language teachers because of what they bring – a non-linear shift into spatial representation of language constructs, which is right up our alley, it’s just that I think it clutters our CI instruction and our classrooms, reflecting what you said.
This is certainly not a popular position to take, but I’m taking it anyway and have been thinking about it a lot this past week in particular. So your comment, Marc, is extremely well timed for me.
I certainly don’t want to get into a big thread here on the use of technology in the foreign language classroom – I would much rather try to develop a thread about how we can get PQA going in our classrooms better, which is a running question for me all the time. But, of course, as is the case with so much of what we uncover every day, the two are related.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could quantify how much personalization and resultant mirth come out of high tech and no tech language classrooms? Maybe Dr. Krashen could help us build a model to measure that by. If mirth and human interaction and subsequent language growth can be quantified.
Marc I pasted a number of your points from your recent post on TPRS Japan
http://www.tprs.jp/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=86
(which will become required reading for me now) into a Word file in my computer and I will try to begin responding to each point over the next few weeks in the form of blog entries. I apologize in advance for not being thorough enough with your questions – they would require an entire workshop to adequately address. Plus, November seems to be showing up as a super busy month of introspection about teaching, at least for me. But we will discuss what we can.
Now, before a long bike ride with Bryce in the mountains today in 76 degree perfect Colorado heavenly weather, I would like to quickly just address a few things you said:
“…I’m pretty sure I can’t spin [student provided personalized information] out for more than 5 minutes…”.
Now in response to that here is just a simple point and not meant to be preachy – if you tell your mind you can’t spin PQA out for 5 minutes, then your mind, which is a computer, will accept that information. What if you could spin PQA for an hour? What would that look like?
My own experience with PQA is that about ten years ago it looked like a book with a lock on it and then one day I found a key lying on the floor in a Susan Gross presentation and picked it up and opened the book and found it quite easy to read. But it does have a lot to do with what you think is possible. I’m not trying to preach here, brother – you know what I mean.
You also said:
“…they already know the details (in Japanese), plus only ONE student out of 12 has had a parking ticket; this is about ONE student, and the other 11 will be getting bored right off the bat…”
If we can get this dialogue on PQA going enough, Marc – and we can do it in private emails as well – I really want to coach you through this – you will see that it is fairly easy to get the other eleven students involved in spite of any negative baggage they are bringing into the room – see a coming post in response to something Thomas Young wrote here recently that is tangential to that thing about kids’ attitudes in language classrooms.
Anyway, here’s what might pop into my mind (be receptive and open to what pops into your mind in CI classes!) if I knew that one of my students got a parking ticket:
The student who got the parking ticket interacts in some way with the next eleven. What would that look like? Well, they can have other peripheral roles in some kind of weird series of events that they don’t know about, but you act like you do.
By skillful questioning, you end up turning the parking ticket fact into a scene with judge and jury and the first student begging for mercy to the judge/student for clemency and the jury/other ten students throwing out curses in English from the jury box at the judge for being such a shit that he would throw the parking ticket victim into jail for five years for a simple parking ticket.
Now, where did that come from? I don’t know. Would it work? I don’ t know. But there is only one way to find out and that is to start asking questions. So I start with some PQA and I say to the class:
Class, Yoshiko got a parking ticket! (I make them go ohhh! by cuing them – remember, doing PQA is a lot like animal training)
Class, did Yoshiko get a parking ticket or a new pair of glasses? (circle that)
As soon as the circling on that gets saturated (you will know when), add a detail or new character in – one of the most valuable things Blaine ever told me).
The circling of a sentence until it is saturated and then the bringing in of a new detail or a new character is key to PQA. In this case that you are testing the PQA waters in here you have eleven students to choose from. Take the attitude that they want to participate and be confident that you can bring them in, because everybody wants to play!
As the PQA rolls out, it is their answers through this continuous circling into greater and greater degrees of fantasy involving THEM, and your gentle guidance of the overall scene into the direction of what occurs to you intuitively during the PQA, that brings the involvement and the fun.
I repeat – they really want to play, even if they are Japanese.
One more thing I have to add here – reflecting that technology topic – I wrote something about this just this week to echo what you said above. I’ll paste it here:
Overuse of Technology
The thing is to have fun. And technology entertains, captures interest, but isn’t very humanly funnily interactive. As Krashen says, “Robots can’t converse.” Take a good look at kids when technology is used a lot in a foreign language classroom. They aren’t that involved. Are they? I could be wrong. I don’t think that they are.
Sorry if that offends. To me, it’s not about how excited the teacher is but how excited the kids are. I don’t even WANT to be that excited because I have to teach five classes a day.
Susie’s term “just have fun and talk to the kids” is the key. And it involves no machines. It is so simple that the truth of it is missed. It is a basic human thing. We have it or we don’t. If we don’t, we don’t have real language acquisition. C’est ce que je pense, moi.