This from John:
Ben,
We create stories together as a class and everything goes great; everyone does their jobs and I’ve got pictures to work with and a rough, written version of the story by my story writer. I take that rough written version and polish it up for our Step 3 Reading, right? I like to add in lots of details and dialogue to make our ROA session richer, too.
My question is this: When you are creating the readings for Step 3 of TPRS that you will ROA with your class, do you add in completely new details that were not at all a part of “story asking” session?
I ask because my PQA during ROA is falling flat. It feels flat because we have already had so many personalized reps during Step 1 of TPRS (i.e., during normal PQA) and then a lot more questions during the asking of the story. How can we make PQA during Step 3 at all interesting after so much PQA during Steps 1 and 2?
My response:
This is a very important question. My answer is to do extremely little spinning (PQA) during ROA of Step 3. Why? Because the kids are working on reading, not PQA. That was already done in Step 1. I used to spin out a lot from ROA, and I have written about that, but now I see that it defeats the purpose of Step 3, which is to teach reading.
Think of Step 3 as a first level embedded reading. Laurie has counseled us over and over to LIMIT the amount of new facts, events, words, etc. in ANY early embedded form of reading. Why is that?
Because then the kids can take the SOUNDS of the story that they worked so hard to create and their minds are then free to TRANSFER the sounds cemented into their minds via all the repetitions during the creation of the story into ANOTHER FORM, no longer oral/aural, but visual (reading).
For that to happen, the reading must be at least 95% exactly what the Story Writer wrote and pretty much an exact rendition of the story from the day before. I have not always seen this, and used to spin out on Step 3 (Jason still does), and it ups the affective filter on the kids because of too much unfamiliar vocabulary.
I am so glad you brought this up about Step 3 John. I did a Learning Lab yesterday for DPS teachers who are new to the method, and my French 1 class (I have this on videotape and will put it here as soon as I can) ended class with a wonderfully strong group choral translation of the projected text. And some of these kids have challenges in reading in English….
Diana told me after the session that she is now going to push her DPS teachers more toward stories and less toward general CI, as she has been for a few years now*. I was hoping that would happen. Because I see in Step 3 clean and simple and uncluttered and exact written versions of the story that bring MUCH MORE POWER in terms of visible reading gains when we do ROA with Step 3 of TPRS as opposed to novels. Why? Novels weren’t written by the kids and so are far less compelling than Step 3 readings. And the have too many words in them.
So John my advise – just my opinion as always, is to not do anything but add maybe three or four (no more) structures or words to an Step 3 story, just to teach them a few new words but that in now way throw the reading train off the tracks. The reason that the PQA in Step 3 falls flat is that the students can’t read it – there is too much new stuff.
In my opinion, as I see it now (and I give myself permission to change my thoughts on this at anytime in favor of what works best for kids), Step 3 Reading is the most powerful form of comprehensible input available to us. By far.
*I think it is because she saw the power of the three locations and the rebar (see category) effect of repeating the target structures three times. We cannot get that kind of repetition in normal PQA, where we sometimes go all over the place. I agree. I have been moving back to favoring stories for some years now. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have at my disposal story scripts that really appeal to teens written by a master, Anne Matava. Her scripts have been the foundation of my entire career with TPRS/CI since 2001.