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Something Old/Something New
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26 thoughts on “Something Old/Something New”
How about this generalization: younger students love stories, but PQA is weird to them. Older students enjoy talking about themselves and their classmates, so PQA works better. This seems to be generally true having taught grades 5-12.
Diane, while it does seem to make sense the idea that the younger students are more self-involved and therefore less engaged in PQA, it might also be a matter of your teaching style. Maybe your teaching style doesn’t jive with PQA so well. Jeff in our TCI Chicagoland group told us at our group meeting on Saturday that he starts the year with stories, bypassing PQA. That works for him. Chris Stolz goes full-force with stories, right? But I forget if he teaches middle school or high school kids.
That generalization about younger kids being a little awkward with PQA has so far been my experience here, Diane. Sixth graders, to be exact, are just not used to talking about themselves in a group even in their L1, I would think. In general, I am finding a world of difference between how high stories can get off the ground with eighth graders vs. sixth graders. We talked about this in our sixth grade thread here last year, and everyone here knows that already, but I am just starting to study how those little ones process now, finally in a real 6th to 8th grade setting. One thing I don’t miss are the catty answers and veiled insults that happen so much in high school. Not needed. Don’t miss it.
Then my experience with younger kids… for me, even 7th and 8th often… lines up. I think it’s developmental. But they can really pretend!
This is good to know, and I’ll see how the distinction plays out in my classes this year. I’m ready to try stories now after doing summer teacher training with Laurie and Elissa, and working with you guys at iFLT.
This year I’m doing 6th grade French and 7th grade Spanish.
🙂
This is a good reminder, that teachers and classes which are more comfortable with stories, can de-emphasize PQA and stick to a script. For those of us in transition from a traditional program with skeptical students/parents/admins, this might be key. Keith Toda posted on this, outlining his week one plan, which is to jump into a story. In the comments he argues that the personalization grows out of the story discussion.
http://todallycomprehensiblelatin.blogspot.com/2015/08/latin-1-week-1-lesson-plan.html
I have found with my 7th and 8th graders that a flexible mix of PQA and stories seems to work the best. I always give PQA a shot because it can be so wonderful when it really connects with the kids. When it is falling flat and not connecting, I just jump to the story.
I must say that going into my first year of TCI, I wasn’t nervous about PQA but was really nervous about stories. This was largely because I kept hearing about stories scaring teachers away from TPRS, and about how quickly kids would grow sick of them. I was surprised by my end of the year feedback to find out how much they LOVED doing stories!
The personalization will come at some point during the process. It may come before, during or after the story making process.
….personalization…may come before, during or after the story making process….
And the student jobs do a lot to keep the kids focused, and then when an actor stands up it is pretty much guaranteed that the story will happen o.k. and if it doesn’t we can always wrap it up quickly and bail to a quiz – we can use just five questions if that is all the quiz writer has – or a reading. We can even have them do some FVR or SSR while we quickly type up the reading from the story made there in class to use ROA on, or we can just write the story right there in class with the kids as a kind of retell activity. Of course this would be without the accents but they can always be added for the reading class the next day. There are so many options if a story isn’t working, but I fully agree John that stories are the most popular thing by far with the kids. I think that they always will be. They are also the most valuable because stories contain the most power to keep the kids focused on the message.
… when it [PQA] is falling flat and not connecting, I just jump to the story….
And John in my experience it is not me or the kids but the quality of the structures that cause flat PQA sessions. Some verbal chunks just don’t lend themselves to personalized questions and answers.
Also, some chunks really lend themselves to talking about some kind of visual aid (objects, photos, etc.) instead.
This is very true!
You’re right, Ben. Some structures aren’t really great conversation starters.
So John we have to demystify the idea that PQA is some kind of important thing. It’s important to the degree that the structures allow us to get reps on target structures to help us set up the story, to make it easier for the kids to understand. But it is not important.
For example, in Anne’s script “Afraid of the Package” we have
received a package
didn’t want to open it
was afraid of
The first one is fun. They say that they received a package (or we PSA it if they are boring people) and we can ask questions about the package, etc. and it can go on for awhile. But the second and third ones are a it rough, although you can ask them present tense questions about what they are afraid. Whatever we are feeling that day, that’s how deep we need to go into PQA. Newer people who think that this is a formula need to hear that. There is no formula, there are no rules, there is only us and our students and open heart, open to what happens on the CI train. This works takes trust in CI, as in:
Skill #22: Staying in the Moment
This is my favorite skill. It requires heart. Staying in the moment means that you do not leave the moment that has been created in the story. You do not digress. You do this to keep the comprehensible input alive. The way to make sure you do this is to:
teach the student and not the language.
stay on the sentence until it parallels the original story – see the conclusion of this book for details on how to do this.
milk in extra details via circling, making sure that the details are connected to the lives of your students.
Staying in the moment may be the most challenging skill of all the TPRS skills because it involves going against so much of what we have all been taught as teachers, which is be in charge, drive the story, say the right thing at the right time, be funny, etc. The fact is that if the teacher is the one driving everything forward, there is no “space” for the kids to join in the game.
Most importantly, if the details of the story are not provided by the students, they will not be interested in the story. The instructor must create spaces via artful questioning that allow for those spaces to be filled by students’ answers that are interesting to them.
This involves staying in the moment, resting there, waiting for the right cute answer, avoiding the desire to push forward. Here is a sample of how that can be done in a story I wrote for my class:
a dévisagé – stared at
est monté – went up
se sont disputés – argued
Marcel and his girlfriend Sheila are in a car on (local street). They stop at a red light.
Sheila looks up at a building. She sees Larry in the building looking out a window at her. Sheila stares at Larry. Larry stares at Sheila.
Marcel is angry. He gets out of the car and goes up the elevator in Larry’s building. He argues with Larry. Sheila cries.
I made a “car” (two chairs) in the middle of the room. I got two kids up to be Marcel and Sheila, thus instantly personalizing the story. They shuffled up to the “car” and looked at me with that expectant look they do. They shuffled too slowly, so I just yelled at them to get into the car:
“Montez dans la voiture! (“Get in the car!”)
I put Larry on the third floor of a “building” (actually a countertop that runs along the side of the classroom). I told Larry to look down at the kids in the car.
With meaning of the structures clearly established, and written and translated and clearly visible and ready to be pointed at throughout the story, with three actors and a good script, all was ready for a great class! “What a great start!” I thought. Then there was that little pause, like, “O.K. what do I do next?”
The kids weren’t laughing and the story wasn’t funny. Instead, they were giving me “the look,” as if to say, “What’s next, oh purveyor of alternative teaching methods?”
I answered their look with my own look, “Hey, you think it is easy to just get a funny story going? I ain’t no Susan Gross! Some of us TPRS teachers actually have to WORK for a story!”
Still the look. But I resisted the urge to yell, “I can’t do this stuff! It’s too hard! Someone help me!” I just stayed in that moment:
Just hang in there, Ben, and explore this moment. Don’t try to drive the story forward too fast! Ask questions and listen to their responses and pick the right ones and just let this thing go forward in its own way! Circle and listen for cute answers! Trust the method and play the game and listen to them! C’mon, man, you can do it!
The look.
Stay in the moment! Ask the questions. Circle or die!
The look.
Class, where is the car? (Paris!) No, class, the car is not in Paris! How absurd! The car is in Denver! (Ohh!) Class, where in Denver? Someone yells out “Colfax Avenue!”
Colfax Avenue is a well-known street in Denver for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is its seediness. I think:
That really is the right street. Yes! Colfax! Perfect! How could it be any other street?
Immediately, the look was gone! The mood in the classroom had completely changed. Nobody was nervous any more. The look had been replaced by smiles and laughter. The boy who suggested Colfax was pleased with himself beyond words.
There are so many stories around Colfax Avenue in Denver that I could tell that each kid was making their own association – all of a sudden what used to be a struggling story was actually alive with energy because of the mention of a street! Colfax Avenue and its reputation in Denver had united us. The idea that their friends were in a car driving around downtown, where so much crazy stuff happens, and no longer in a classroom in southwest Jefferson County, had captured their interest.
By staying in the moment of the story until a cute answer was suggested, the story was saved. The kids were given their voice in the story. It took off from there. Had I reacted to the look by taking everything over, jumping out of the moment into something I could control, the resultant disenfranchisement of the kids would have dragged the story to a halt.
Later in the story, I had another opportunity to stay in the moment – this time it was to wait for the right physical detail to be suggested:
When Marcel was being jealous because Sheila was looking up out of the car into the window at Larry, I waited until I got the right answer from the class:
Class, why is Sheila staring at Larry?
No answer. The look. Another one of those moments where I could either rescue the story or stay in the moment and wait for the right response. What should I do? I waited. I resisted the impulse to tell the kids that Sheila was looking at Larry because she thought he was cute, which would have been my idea and not theirs.
Then, from the left side of the classroom, just when the discomfort in the classroom was growing, a superstar blurted out in English these words in a fit of laughter while putting her hand to her nose:
Because Larry has a big zit on his nose!!!
Bingo! Hanging out in the moment had again paid a big dividend, well worth the discomfort that was in the room just a few seconds before. The class erupted in laughter, and my superstar had one of those big “wall to wall” smiles on her face.
I immediately told her that this was exactly why Sheila was looking at Larry. It was obvious! She was correct! I expressed true amazement that she knew that. I sent the message that I myself could never have come up with such a cute answer. I told her how proud I was of her perfect suggestion at the perfect time in the story and I heaped the praise on. Nothing motivates like success, and my superstar had been successful because I had stayed in the moment and not rescued the story.
Of course, sometimes we wait and nothing cute is suggested. Does that mean the students aren’t learning and that we are failures at TPRS? No. Cute answers, though wonderful and in my opinion necessary, are not the point of TPRS.
Are the kids hearing the language? Are we speaking the target language to them in the class, and are the kids reporting in on comprehension checks at 80% or above? If so, then we are doing our jobs. Then, echoing Gilbert Gottfried, we can say with confidence, “I am intelligent, I am a good person, and gosh darn it, my students are learning!”
So staying in the moment may produce wonderful suggestions that give sparkle to a story, but if it does not, that is just fine. We need to expect less from TPRS than all glitter and gold. Personalized comprehensible input is just fine.
My steps 1 and 2 are both stories.
Step 1 = story (fictional or not) about students.
Step 2 = story about a made-up character.
Step 1: I reduce the story to a “mini-story” (the entire story told with just the targets) and then I ask this targeted mini-story with a few different students. Note: primary focus is auditory reps of new targets.
Step 2: This story is embellished (character, scenes, etc.) and I recycle as much language as possible, but the targets are still what shape the story.
Stories have NEVER gotten a negative review and every year my students ask for more on the end-of-the-year evaluation. This year I commit to doing MORE stories, especially with my older grades (7th & 8th).
Yes I agree on that Step 1 Eric. When we get reps in PQA we are just trying to get reps but it usually happens that a “story” happens. So then I don’t know whether to stop it and start a regular Step 2 story or run with the first one as the regular story. It’s a good problem to have.
For me, it depends on the class personalities more so than age.
With my very sweet and compliant (for now!) 8th graders, I can PQA more. With my quiet, reserved high school block, I can PQA more. With my chatterbox class full of 9th grade show-offs, I can barely get them involved in story creation. Yesterday I had to bail out to a dictation because I just could not achieve focus. They LIKE PQA and talking about themselves, but they don’t listen well, even after I held them accountable with a quiz.
PQA has so much potential to go off the rails or go nowhere, though, so I prefer to stick to stories and then sprinkle it in to change up my story questioning.
This is kind of about PQA: yesterday I met with a new freshman girl who took Chinese in middle school. We placed her into the Intermediate (aka 2nd year) class; I expected she’d have some adjustment to how much Chinese is used in class, but I can work with that if the student will, and she seemed to be ready to do that. She didn’t need to start over with Novice. (My school is switching to proficiency titles for classes.)
So anyway, we just had freshmen at school yesterday, and she’s the only freshman in that Intermediate class. As part of meeting with her, I shared photos/discussed my life in China. Then we talked through a Simon’s Cat video, “Cat Man Do,” Video & Discuss style. Here’s why I’m writing this comment: she could not answer any questions because her teacher had them rehearse sentence-long dialogues. Essentially, she’d never really spoken with someone in Chinese in 2 years of class. She’d vocalized statements.
Here’s what happened: Video screenshot shown.
I say in Chinese, pointing to the picture, slowly: “Is Simon sleeping?” and she says in English, “Uh, is Simon sleeping?… uh, yes.” At first I just repeated her answer in Chinese, but she kept talking in English (and translating the question first) that I asked if she’d speak Chinese for her answer instead. But next answer she broke into English again. Then she told me they’d never learned yes and no (which Chinese doesn’t have in just one form – you typically use the verb as a reply). She said they did practice where one student would read a sentence aloud, and the next student would read another sentence aloud in reply. So I said she could nod or shake her head, and I’d say the Chinese for what she meant. Later on she began to give a few one-word answers in Chinese. She knew the words I was saying, but obviously was retrieving memorized language and thinking in English. Ouch. She’ll overcome this because I think she likes Chinese and will listen to understand. She already was doing that.
Such a reminder to me about how skill-building approaches to language instruction (“present, practice, produce”) are so terrible at actual language proficiency. I really had forgotten that she may never have been asked an honest question seeking her real opinion, and given that answer in normal conversational ways, in 2 years of class.
Even just asking students a question without requiring one specific answer is personalizing, to some degree.
Poor girl. You’ll pull her out of that dungeon, Diane!
… and straight into the basement. Haha! (For those who read this and don’t know yet, my classroom and most other world language classrooms were moved from bright rooms on floor 2 into the windowless basement.)
Wow, this is giving me a lot to think about…
“Essentially, she’d never really spoken with someone in Chinese in 2 years of class. She’d vocalized statements.”
The complaint that I got about stories was that a few students didn’t like the far-out themes. I explained to them about the use of high-frequency structures, but they were not impressed. One student insisted to the end that this was language that she would “never use”. I tried to weave in some non-fiction stuff for her, but did not give up stories altogether because they were just too effective and popular with other students.
Are the students in the same class? Are they feeding off of each other?
Ugh. Students who think they know more because they don’t like something.
I would just smilingly point out the frequency chart and move on, as long as that student isn’t affecting others’ learning.
I have had this too. I have quite a mix in class usual from slacker types to quite overachieving types and having them meld is sometimes difficult for me. The stories seem to bring that out on occasion as one group or the other thinks they are either too fantastical or too mundane. They usually start nicely for me, but I have a hard time maintaining the momentum and energy I want in German II in the spring. On the other hand my group two years ago just ran with them all year long.
For the students who don’t see the language in the stories as being “practical,” besides the “frequency talk,” you can add more dialogue between actors if that helps them feel like it’s more applicable to the real world.
Group dynamics matter. I think you have to have buy-in from the majority of the class. Adding in other CI activities (MovieTalk, Natural Approach style games, TPR, etc.) can help keep things novel and stories shine in comparison. It’s relative. If the kids are used to eating cake every day, they stop desiring cake (I’ve got a huge sweet tooth, so this wouldn’t be a problem with me. ha).
That student is wrong. You are giving her the package and the gift inside, with a ribbon. The gift is language, priceless language. The actual presents can vary from something bizarre to something mundane. She wants mundane. Good for her. But her snark is housed in pride and messages from parents who know no better but nevertheless pontificate. The fact that you are giving her the package and the present and the wrapping and the ribbon and the card and everything, the entire input language package, with a nice dose of yourself added in there, wonderful Angie, and she is complaining about the package’s contents, is not being appreciated by this student. You are the professional Angie. Don’t listen to her. She’s wrong. Tell her that she can sit in the back of the room and work on something else. Then, whenever she glares at you inwardly from the back of the room, take a deep breath and fly your freak L2 flag. And then, play this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RZNBEfXVkI
Just substitute out the word “person” with the word “personalization”.