This suggested class sequence provides more detail than Suggested Class Sequence A:
We have outlined a three step core process/drive train for any comprehensible input activity, and we have described how that process can take the form of seven steps. Like an accordion, it can also be expanded out to nineteen steps. We offer these more detailed steps for any readers who may wish to go even deeper into the overall process.
All steps added in below are merely suggestions that I have found work well for me in my classroom, and are not meant to be prescriptive in any way. However, printing out these nineteen steps and putting them somewhere you can see them when you are just starting out with super mini-stories could serve to keep you on track as you start learning how to teach this way:
1. Establish meaning for each structure. (Just say, “Class, this means that”. That’s how you establish meaning. It takes five seconds. Avoid pontificating when you do this.)
2. Ask the students to show you a gesture for each structure. Say in the TL, “Class, show me ______!”
3. Practice the gestures a few times in a spirit of fun and amazement about how clever the students are. Try to remember to look at the student who provided the gesture with approval each time you mention it in class,
4. Ask some personalized questions using the three structures. Keep things light. If the students are tight lipped during this time, use PSA.
5. In super mini stories, work with seated students as actors or bring actors up in front of the room.
6. If the first sentence in the script is “John wants to buy a car!” (“John” and “car” are the underlined variables and “wants to buy” is your target structure), ask the class to replace John with the name of the student or a name that the class makes up for the actor. This can be a celebrity, the school principal or anyone.
7. Say that John “wants to buy” (try to remember to gesture it when saying it to make it easier for the class to understand you – this is hard to remember but is worth it to the kids. They will even start gesturing during the story back to you if you forget, which is a wonderful thing).
8. Ask what “John” wants to buy. With beginning CI students, always laser point to the question word on the wall when you ask the question.
9. You now have a personalized sentence along the lines of “Class, Big Eddie (student in your class) wants to buy a nutcracker!”
10. Now don’t go to the next sentence right away! Spin whatever details you can from this sentence using Circling. Remember what is happening here – the class is focusing on an image that they think they have created but you are focusing on getting as many repetitions as you can on “wants to buy”. Keep them focused on the image while you stay focused on repeating the structure. Don’t forget that you can circle in questions about the subject, the verb, or the object. In addition, you can also constantly personalize the questions by asking parallel questions about other students in the class as described above.
11. Do the same process whenever a sentence in the script gets exhausted – just go to the next sentence and the next and the next and work your way through the story. You don’t have to remember everything that the class suggests – it’s all being recorded by the story writer.
12. With the story now created, ask for a round of applause for the actors.
13. Now is the time to process the artist’s work done on an iPad or just on a sheet of paper for the document camera. Ask lots of questions about the images – they provide greater and greater amounts of repetitions, which is the entire point of storytelling, to drive the language deeper and deeper into the minds of the students.
14. During this time of processing the artist’s work, remember to give ample happy praise for the artwork. Also try to get into the habit of asking for rounds of applause whenever merited. How many teachers require students to applaud their classmates in class?
15. An option at this point is to use the image created by the artist to ask for a retell by the class. You can use a cloze technique to do this or you can ask for a retell by an individual student.
16. Give a quick quiz on the story at the end of class. Remember that these are yes/no or true/false questions. Avoid asking questions that are not y/n or t/f unless you have a lot of extra time to grade the quizzes. We give the quiz at the end of the class and not the next day because the information is still fresh in the students’ minds and success on quizzes is key to student buy-in in this work. (I am happy that we in this work are finally changing the face of testing to be honoring and not shaming to students.) As the students leave the class, collect the quizzes and the story in L1 from your story writer. Don’t forget to toss the quizzes in the trash if you are busy that day. Only keep and grade quizzes when you need a grade. There is no contract with your students that requires you to grade and enter a quiz into your gradebook. Workaholic teachers, of course, can ignore this suggestion.
17. The next day, having written up the super mini story in L2 (this takes about one minute to do for super mini stories), present the reading to the class using Reading Option A (see Appendix D in this book for details).
18. At this point another quiz option is to ask the students to translate the story for a really easy grade. This builds confidence and trust in the students that you are on their side. It will pay off in higher enrollments later. And when the students are doing real stories, you can ask them to write possible optional endings to the story in the TL.
19. If you want yet a third grade at this point and have time to do it (two minutes), throw in a self-evaluation grade according to the form available at benslavic.com on the TPRS Resources posters page.
Note that these nineteen steps are nothing but one way to expand the Three Steps of TPRS, which provide us with the basic sequence of instruction that makes comprehensible input work in our classrooms. Those three steps are the key to everything we do. Over time with the Three Steps as the core sequence, teachers will develop their own way of using them – the above is mine.
The Three Steps may be the core of this work conceptually, but applying the strategies found in this book is the work. It is recommended that teachers know where they are in terms of the Three Steps at any point in class as a kind of reference point. With the Three Steps as a reference point, and as long as we are doing comprehensible input in the form or listening and reading with our students and waiting for output in the form of writing and speech to occur when they naturally emerge, we are doing this work and we will see the results in the form of greater course enrollments and in greater job satisfaction.