Elissa asked for some thoughts on transitioning into stories. Carla or anybody – please constribute on this topic – we need to start talking about it. I am sure that there are many other blog entries on this site over the past three years that also address this topic, so if anybody finds any now is a good time to put them up here again.
So how to get from PQA and the cards and the one word images into stories? One way is to simply start extending the PQA that you have been doing a bit. Take Carl’s interest in drawing and Jenn’s interest in horseback riding and get both kids up (they get practice at acting before you actually start stories) and ask questions and see where that goes.
It may be that the class, via their cute answers to your questions, leads you into the image of Carl and Jenna riding into Starbucks and drawing on the ceiling because they are on such super big horses. Just be open to where they take you.
This extended PQA will give you the basis for working from a story script later. Always keep the images a bit bizarre and exaggerated – they catch the attention of the brain.
(Those who say that such images are too silly and have little to do with the seriousness of a “real” language classroom miss the point entirely – we are here to trick our kids into learning a language by having our students’ minds focus on a message, not the language itself, so that the learning is unconscious. This is how we learn languages, not by consciously focusing on discrete grammar rules, etc.)
Once you start stories, remember the following. Don’t forget that we use target structures to set things up as per Step One in TPRS with stories. The thing is that, in stories vs. PQA and extended PQA, we must stay with those structures.
Our lessons are geared towards and around those structures. They are hurricane rods to our CI house. So we stay with them throughout the story. This is no longer extended PQA, but full blown stories, and the winds will blow hard, so we need those hurricane rods.
We go slowly and we circle. We get a hundred repetitions of the first structure via circled questions that are interesting and meaningful to the kids and that drives the story through to the next location. We move the actors.
Once we feel that the first structure has been sufficiently repeated (we know that by looking into our students’ eyes, doing hand comprehension checks, always checking for meaning), the second and third structures come into play as the action develops. They don’t necessarily come into play in a parallel way to the three locations.
(At least all of this is what I think – I am open to correction on any of this. I’m trying to get a thread going for Elissa and others who feel that it will be soon time to start stories and who feel that their kids are ready for a kick up the CI challenge ladder.)
It’s easy to forget the structures as new things develop in the CI. Just trust that, by focusing only on the structures and getting tons of repetitions on them, the little words in between the utterances of the structures get learned on a completely unconscious level. It is an amazing thing to see. Passing grades on the AP exam look suddenly possible if that’s what floats your boat.
The structures in a standard TPRS Step One/Step Two format form the central binding rods, as mentioned above, through the building of the CI. This is Blaine Ray’s genius and it works.
All that said, we must be able to grasp that the three steps, the structures, the scripts, the locations, all of that, can take many forms. There is so much room for improvisation within the three steps.
Therefore, to interpret the three steps as a formula would not be accurate – rather, they are guidelines. Blaine and Susan Gross have set out for us a set of guidelines, really.
Once we get how much leeway (to follow the seredipitous nature of comprehensible input) we have in this approach, we will feel less apprehensive about stories.
For new people just starting stories, it is all very confusing. On one hand they are told to follow a story script and follow the three steps, and on the other they are told to riff new jazz ideas from the script.
So it is jazz. It is also the art of the fugue. The only way to find out about these things, how following a script and riffing off a script are really one and the same thing, one has to play that first note in the song. And, as happens often, almost every day for awhile sometimes, one has to accept it if it is not Miles Davis.