I made a mistake. I created 4TR (Four Truths) because I thought it would get more output from the kids. That was not true, I am finding. The quality of the speech in that (still wonderful!) activity was forced and, if speech output is forced even a little bit (forced = made conscious) it is a bad thing, in my opinion.
I think it was a problem of timing. I didn’t see that much speech output during stories esp. in my beginners. But now, doing stories now after a two month hiatus, I see that my kids were just in the Silent Period and now, unbelievably to me actually, they hardly let me get a word in edgewise during the creation of a story.
Two students are just pouring out the language. Yes, it really is so butchered, but I can understand it and that is all that matters. Just now a class of sixth graders got into a major argument in French, all of them yelling at once in the most gloriously fractured French I have ever heard, something I have never seen before, over the manner in which a lint ball on the floor, Nevaya, the daughter of M. Lintus Lint, who has 300 other invisible kids living in our carpet – all lint balls – in our classroom, saved her dad from the vacuum cleaner.
One group said she pulled the plug out of the ball (man did I get some reps on a branché and a débranché(!), the other group said she is not strong enough to do that, that she just cut the cord, and the third group said that she just turned off the power, which is a verb we have been working on from the word wall.
So stories produce more speech output than any other activity is my conclusion. We just don’t notice it because of the Silent Period.
Note for French teachers: how cool is this? The word for dust ball, dust bunny is mouton or mouton de poussière.