The Din of Translation Work

4 thoughts on “The Din of Translation Work”

1. Joe E.

   December 9, 2012 at 4:54 pm

   I teach levels 3 and 4 and this is my first year teaching using TPRS and my students’ first exposure to it. What is your opinion on translating the stories for these upper levels? I remember reading somewhere that you translate less and less in the upper levels.

   Thanks
   Joe

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2. Ben Slavic

   December 9, 2012 at 8:47 pm

   Joe I don’t know bc I rarely have used this method at upper levels and then only with classes who had never had it. However, we have a number of skilled upper level CI teachers in this group and I’m sure someone will address your question.

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3. Robert Harrell

   December 9, 2012 at 9:07 pm

   Hi Joe, I don’t know about skilled, but I do have experience through all the levels (the life of a German teacher).

   The basic principle to keep in mind is “Comprehensibility”. You do what you have to to achieve that. If your “classically trained” students need English to understand what they are reading, use it. Normally what happens is that as students acquire vocabulary and grammar, it becomes easier to stay in the target language with comprehensibility; thus the need to translate into English becomes less and less. Eventually (but not in four years of high school) it will disappear entirely. You can get pretty close in high school, though. (That is, you as teacher can find ways to explain things in the target language so that your students understand; students will still need to use English to express themselves.)

   So, you as the expert in your content area will determine if English translation is needed as a comprehension check or scaffolding to aid comprehension, based on the level of acquisition of your students. My personal guess is that at first you will need to use quite a bit of English, but your upper-level students ought to move more quickly into greater T2 only usage.

   In the reading I am doing with my levels 3 and 4, we do 10 minutes of silent reading. Then I take 10 (or so) minutes to answer questions about the text and point out some grammar points of which I want them to have an awareness, then we discuss the text in German.

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4. Ben Slavic

   December 9, 2012 at 9:09 pm

   Joe this article MAY address at least a part of your question:

   The Unconscious Mind Is Wonderfully Set Up
   by Ben Slavic
   in CI, Comprehensible Input, Krashen

   When you assess a kid on whether he knows certain discrete facts about the language, you kill his interest in it.

   The tragedy is that his mind already possesses wiring (that we often do not acknowledge) that is easily capable of acquiring the language, if only it were left to its own ways of decoding, which need but hear the language in massive amounts of comprehensible input.

   Think if you tested a small child using the itemized testing method. You would give him the impression that he’s not good at it, because, even if he could decode much of what he heard, he wouldn’ t know how to spell certain things and all of that that is currently done. He couldn’t possibly answer questions like verb form spellings.

   Rather, flood students’ (of any age) minds with language – lots and lots of it. This is what Krashen. In reading as well. The important book, The Power of Reading, by Krashen, basically says one thing – if you want your students to become better readers, read more.

   The unconscious mind is wonderfully set up to select exactly what it wants to learn among the din that it constantly hears and reads over long periods of time.

   This complex unconscious process is not apparent in classrooms, however, and so many teachers have adopted a “show me what you know” attitude towards assessing, especially in the early levels, when the students in point of fact aren’t yet ready to do that.

   If said teachers, so eager to see results from their efforts to “teach”, could only be patient and let the input do its unseen work for the first few years, the gains would be astounding. The mind would work à l’abri de sa chambre inconsciente and, when the flowers bloomed, it would be some garden!

   The unconscious mind is so wonderfully set up to select exactly what it needs when it needs it, that even stupid people (in teachers’ eyes) can gain fluency, if Malcom Gladwell is to be believed, in merely 10,000 hours.

   So Joe, maybe the cutting down of direct translation in upper levels is a good idea, to get that din going. I hope others chime in on this.

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