Mike Peto recently published this on his blog:
https://mrpeto.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/story-listening-almost/
I find every word of his article compelling and important. He talks about how doing Story Listening as per Beniko Mason, which is getting a ton of testing at the secondary school level in Oregon right now, really works.
I am beyond happy to find another way, a fourth way, to teach using comprehensible input that is tried, tested and proven to work. Story Listening, along the other three ways of doing CI, is a welcome addition to our growing CI arsenal,
One thing that is truly worth adding in here is the paragraph from Mike’s article. It riffs on Beniko’s original idea, but that is what we do, we test stuff and push limits:
…I did stray in one important way from the ethos of story listening: I had my students illustrate the story as I told it, and when I was finished I had them go back and write in text to their cartoon versions. I just could not trust that they would listen to me for 36 minutes straight without daydreaming or outright snoozing. I am honestly not sure if this lack of faith reflects my own uncertainty in my skills as a storyteller, recognition that school has taught them to play the accountability game, or simply if the activity, the illustrating, helps them maintain the thread of a complicated story in their own minds. Maybe a bit of all three….