Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Step 1 of TPRS is Important
Share:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Ben Slavic
Get The Latest Updates
Subscribe to Our Mailing List
No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.
Related Posts
CI and the Research (cont.)
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Research Question
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
We Have the Research
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
19 thoughts on “Step 1 of TPRS is Important”
In my mind the Three Steps look like this:
1) Establish Meaning
1.1) Write words on board
1.2) Create gesture
1.3) Use PQA
2) Ask a Story
3) Read
As I mentioned in another thread, I believe that PQA is one component of establishing meaning because it demonstrates the natural setting and limits of the word or structure. For example, I may need to set the limit that jugar/jouer should not be applied to musical instruments, something that is more likely to come up in PQA than in a story.
A slightly different way of viewing the process.
Maybe this is a case of “We learn the rules so we can break them.” We can be flexible. We can combine steps, change the order of steps, even leave a step out. Changing it up adds novelty. The big picture idea is that the 3 steps are a process for increasing the CI of targets.
I forget who said it, but PQA is like breaking in the shoes. We’re trying out the targets. Tasting them. Getting kids used to the sounds.
PQA is great for community building, which also lowers affective filters (although in my elementary school case, the kids have known each other for a long time, so much of that get-to-know-you has been done). It also gives us some ideas and motifs for future stories. Since the “Personalization” in PQA is often imaginary, yet comes from the students and is relevant and compelling to them, it has also been called “Customization” (credit: Terry Waltz, I think). We get customization from the stories. Stories are just as student-centered. We can also do “PQA tangents” within a story.
I’m not sure it’s me, the students, or the method, but PQA doesn’t work as well in my classes as stories, TPR, reading, and MT. It’s somehow harder for the students to listen. I can see it would be especially hard if the PQA were completely aural/abstract – no props, no visuals, no actors. Maybe PQA is uncomfortable for students not used to this type of student-teacher interaction and they run from that human aspect.
This relates to a forum topic and I think some of us agree that when the targets are within the framework of a story they are better acquired. PQA still has value, but maybe more for classroom norming, community building, and has the potential to enhance stories.
I’d like to see some comparison studies of TCI methods. We know all the TCI methods are superior to traditional methods. TPRS is the only one that has this PQA step. Would including PQA make TCI more effective? PQA often is the most targeted CI the students get and that may be good for maintaining 100% comprehensibility, but also puts serious constraints on interest.
PQA is hard. It is essentially improvised. I think it’s the hardest TPRS step and it’s listed as Step #1. That alone may be enough to turn teachers away from TPRS. We can be successful TPRS teachers without doing PQA as a separate step before the story. I agree that it feels more like 4 steps, translation/gesture/visualization being the step prior to PQA. This prior step consists of good “learning” strategies, but in our case they are included because they can make subsequent input more comprehensible. I also liked how Laurie said last year that PQA can be the “story” step. At least that’s what I understood she was saying đ
Eric-my experience with PQA sounds very different from yours. It makes me curious. I have a feeling this is the one step where there is the most variation from day to day and from teacher to teacher. I wonder if people don’t get to explore this step enough. It’s true. It’s mooshy, can’t be/shouldn’t be standardized–it’s just basic CI. I worry that people try to shove themselves into someone else’s style, and it doesn’t fit. Everyone’s experience is unique.
I don’t find PQA hard. I find PQA to be the perfect and (for me) necessary transition/reinforcement activity between “establishing meaning” and “the story.” It is a time for the students to hear/see ONE structure at a time within the context of very few other words, so they can get it in their ears, really start to get the meaning connected with the sound, and start to have imaginative fun with the structure. If I start to get bored, I move on.
It appears there are many, many ways to approach this transition step. I have tried skipping it and going straight to a long story with little success. The story flies out of bounds almost immediately. Starting with PQA means there are a ton of little mini-stories (PQAs) before we get started with the long story. PQA mini-stories create lots of little narrative hooks which can be used in the longer narrative the next day. For me, PQA means focusing on many students for a while and then, focusing on maybe three kids to do a “meaty,” PQA mini-narrative–like three sentences or so. It is easy to go slowly. The kids need me to go slowly, introduce very little, and let the brand new structures start to settle in without a lot of memory work going on (having to remember plot details, sequence, etc.).
I worked at a hoity-toity private school for a long time and always, always avoided any personalization which might backfire on me or the students. Fantasy and positive comparisons with famous people of their choice were always a safe bet.
I don’t find PQA to be any more improvised than a story. It’s very narrow in my experience. I try to think of questions, while I’m planning my lesson, that can spark the mini-narrative, stay in bounds, get those reps, and be fun. I would be hesitant to suggest we throw this step out–especially for people like me who really like it and find it to be an essential part of the whole.
I have found PQA to be a place an easy way to introduce traditional teachers to using CI in the classroom without full-blown stories. In workshops I’ve done, I find traditional teachers are quite familiar with asking kids questions using new vocabulary–look at all of those horrible book exercises! Unfortunately, they think personalization/customization is asking 30 kids the same question: Do you like to ski? Do you like to ski in Montana or in Colorado? Snore. It’s really interesting to watch traditional teachers learn to ask questions that spark the imagination of kids and keep the classroom fun with a whole lot of compelling repetitions of the structures.
I’d be interested in exploring PQA as a topic for improving the opportunities to deliver CI at the very beginning steps–not for getting rid of it.
I am new to TPRS and enjoyed reading how you use PQA. I tried some last year, but found I was one of those new teachers that wasn’t quite sure how to use the questioning process to engage the kids for more than a few minutes. Could you offer some examples of the types of questions you ask to assure that the PQA works and doesn’t lead to boredom? Thanks!
Lisa,
There is so much here. The key is circling. But reading will only take you so far.
Go to videos tab at the top.
Watch Ben do circling. Notice types of questions asked and the answers expected.
Log out and open the TPRS Resources tab. Open Circling with Balls. Watch the two CWB videos. This is just like PQA, except the teacher already knows whether or not someone skateboards. You are doing Personal Question and Answer. Notice how he starts with one person (skateboards). Then he moves to a girl (plays basketball). Now there is a contrast. Then he goes back to another guy (also skateboards). If we keep asking if the first person skateboards that will lose interest. But if we focus on someone else (who plays basketball), we can eventually get back to asking about the first person. This return is not boredom, it is familiarity, security and comfort. But we do not stay there, unless we want to get another detail (where? with whom?).
That’s enough said. Watch the videos…more than once. And let us know how it is going.
Yeah I agree mixing PQA in during the stories and readings feels more natural, less “we have to do this so then we can do that.”
Sorry, should have said I agree with Eric. Not Ben. I NEVER agree with Ben. đ
I don’t mean to suggest that PQA should be thrown out. Merely suggesting, based on my limited experience, that it is not essential it be done as a first step in order to have success.
James you’ll agree with me when I withdraw my support for you as lead singer of the Latin Kings and give it to Piazza.
I agree PQA can be hard and fall flat sometimes, but for me I think the problem with it is me finding questions to ask that make it interesting, not the kids ability to focus or listen like Eric said he sees. I usually wing it, but Jody saying that she sits down and really thinks about about questions that will ” spark the mini-narrative, stay in bounds, get those reps, and be fun,” makes me see how her planning frees her PQA. It goes hand in hand with what Ben said yesterday about establishing meaning and staying with those structures.
Jody you said you would be interested in exploring PQA more, me too. I would love to hear some concrete examples of that planning, a few examples of sparking the imagination.
At times I have asked myself right in the middle of class if I was still in PQA or if the story was now taking on a kind of PQA quality or if I was actually in a story. It can be confusing. What is not confusing is that if we don’t go for mega reps of the SAME few structures during the entire period we will not get the results we want.
I also would like to quote a few of sentences from Jody that I really resonate with, little gems about how properly done PQA serves the greater good of the story:
…PQA mini-stories create lots of little narrative hooks which can be used in the longer narrative the next day…. (Those little hooks from PQA, when they get into a story, make the story a lot more interesting to the kids.)
…PQA [is] the perfect and (for me) necessary transition/reinforcement activity between âestablishing meaningâ and âthe story.â… (This is the bedrock idea without which we would never have heard about TPRS because it never would have worked without it.)
…I have tried skipping it and going straight to a long story with little success. The story flies out of bounds almost immediately…. (Ditto.)
…[PQA] is a time for the students to hear/see ONE structure at a time within the context of very few other words, so they can get it in their ears, really start to get the meaning connected with the sound…. (I don’t think enough people do this focusing on ONE structure for long periods of time. Keri did last week with great results, and she is new to all of this. That says a lot – she is new, she followed the three step plan to the letter, and had some great classes.)
…for me, PQA means focusing on many students for a while and then, focusing on maybe three kids to do a âmeaty,â PQA mini-narrativeâlike three sentences or so…. (This is major and largely not done. I think it is a secret. You move from general PQA to focused – on just a few kids – PQA. That is often when the PQA takes off into a story before you even knew what happened. Lots of power in this unheralded, mostly unnoticed idea.)
…unfortunately, they think personalization/customization is asking 30 kids the same question: Do you like to ski? Do you like to ski in Montana or in Colorado? Snore…. (This is too true. Those aren’t interesting questions. Why? Because they don’t ring true. They are shallow and wide and not really personalized at all.)
All I am saying here is that in my opinion the Three Steps flow in their most efficient form when the PQA is strong to start the process. I ended up doing a full day of PQA before doing stories on the second day and the reading on the third, more or less. I certainly don’t see how it is possible to cram all three steps into one day, like they used to do.
The goal: compelling + comprehensible input. How you get that is up to the individual teacher. TPRS is unique among TCI methods because it also has the goal of “concentrated input” – heavily targeted -and aims for 100% comprehensibility and translatability.
Instead of PQA, you could do a different story with the same structures, a parallel story, or simply do twice as many “events/locations” (e.g. usually 3, but can be 6) within one story. The more you stick to the script, the less improvisation. The more the script is reduced to only the structures, the more targeted and less chance of going out of bounds. But maybe without 1 of the 3 steps it can’t be considered “TPRS” anymore.
I like PQA and I’m excited to keep practicing it in my classes.
I may be one of the weirdos who wonders if only semi-targeted CI is ideal. It’s a trade-off between recognition and production vocabulary. Targeted CI results in a smaller vocabulary recognition quantity, but more of it will have been progressed to production vocabulary, whereas a less targeted approach would theoretically lead to more recognition and less production vocabulary. If students have larger recognition vocabularies, then there will be more sources of CI available to them, they would be able to make more sense of the outside world, so in the long-run there’d be more acquisition opportunities.
I worry about vocabulary building in TPRS, because we may shelter too much. Communication depends much more on recognizing the lexical items than processing the form. Then again, the truth may be that most students won’t use any time out of class to get more CI, so our job as teachers is to progress as much vocabulary into production as possible. I feel like vocabulary that is recognized, but not ready for production is more fragile and forgotten.
I am a big fan of PQA as well, because it is not limited by the constraints of a story which needs to go somewhere. It allows the interaction to be more spontaneous and organic, and I can dive in depth to a student’s response if it is particularly interesting. Ultimately, it is the freedom of PQA, while still being focused on the structure, that I find compelling.
Of course there are always some structures which simply do not lend themselves to PQA. Those ones that fall flat after 30 seconds and absolutely no one has anything interesting to say about it, least of all me. For me, that’s the time to skip it, move on, and just work it more in the story.
In terms of sheltering vocabulary too much – isn’t that always the complaint that our non CI colleagues lob at us? I find that even sheltering vocabulary as much as I can (and I don’t think I’m great at it), and getting easily more than 200 reps on a structure over the course of a week – students come back to school for the new year and have forgotten a particular structure. That, to me, is immensely frustrating.
Eric,
I appreciate your willingness to raise the questions. As one whose goal is to read and understand ancient Hebrew, I am acutely aware at how slow it is to read for pages before a word pops up again. There is progress. But it is slow. I am an adult with a love of language. I can hold off and endure for the payoff. But my Spanish students need concentration and the depth.
Several questions come to mind.
If we increase the vocabulary, will our messages still be comprehensible?
Can we go broad and deep at the same time?
What is the limit to adding new words in a given context?
How many new items can one attend to and process in a single sentence?
How many times must a student hear the word before it becomes a recognition word?
They are all ways wondering about our limits.
And our greatest limit is time. All things being equal, it is only the amount of CI which makes the difference. If John and Sally are compared and John has 100 hours while Sally has 200 hours, then Sally is closer to the goal of fluency.
Great questions, Nate! I don’t have any definitive answers.
I think there are ways to stay comprehensible (not translatable) and loosen up the language.
What would be the pros/cons to spaced reps (wide) vs. massed reps (narrow)? Both could go deep (total reps over the year may be similar).
…students come back to school for the new year and have forgotten a particular structure….
And we nor the students are to be blamed, any more than we could be expected to learn the location of a certain star in the sky with precision each night as the heavens turn. The language is that big. So I am really glad you make the point David, but always remember, and this is just my opinion, that the language is far too big for us to be able to expect what many of us in pollyannish fashion expect our students to accomplish each year. We must lower our expectations and respect the factors working against us in this profession. The factors are real and do not exist with our L1 experiences. To not respect those limitations would be professional folly.
Each school year I try to pick a theme or a goal. A number of years ago I chose to LET GO of the idea that any of my students SHOULD HAVE already acquired any particular structure. At the time, early in my TPRS adventures, I was going crazy with kids asking me the meaning of simple structures (in my mind!) It was an interesting endeavor and it took me the entire year to be comfortable doing it!!! Here is what I found:
1. Students frequently asked me for clarification on structures for reassurance….not for the answer. The majority of the time they actually knew the answer, but wanted to verify that they were correct. They lacked confidence. Big time. So much so that they were often afraid to guess, even though many times they ACTUALLY ALREADY KNEW THE STRUCTURE!! They assumed that they couldn’t possibly know it. This was eye-opening for me and for them.
2. When I stopped being stressed over them not “knowing” things, it changed the entire “feel” in the classroom. It took much of the year, however, the simple fact that it was okay to ask for something they didn’t know, or to verify a meaning, lowered everyone’s affective filter.
3. The students most affected by this were the “bright” students. They struggled mightily with not having everything they wanted to say fall out of their mouths or off of their pens in perfect form. When I allowed them to need time to acquire it took time for them to adjust to the idea. However, it gave them a very different perspective on our class, AND helped them to be more forgiving and supportive of others in the class.
4. Every time a student needs clarification it is an AMAZING OPPORTUNITY FOR INTERACTION. Not an annoyance. Not a reflection of my poor teaching. Not an expression of their inability to pay attention. Not an interruption to my beautifully planned lesson. Not the result of their not doing the work. Not a criticism of me as an educator. An AMAZING OPPORTUNITY for my students and I to solve a problem together.
This piece is part of the classroom expectations and behavior that I have to introduce at the beginning of the year and model all year long. Especially now that I am only teaching levels 3,4 and 5. Thank you so much for reminding me! (We start with students on Thursday!)
with love,
Laurie
Your post really resonates with my experience, Laurie–from recognizing what was really going on, when kids say they don’t know something, to instituting a truly no-shame clarification policy in the classroom. Huge win for students, class atmosphere, and for me as a person.
Rings very true for me, too. Always welcoming those questions and not shaming the asker is a big deal towards a classroom of trust.