So we know that we want to personalize and set the rules firmly in place over the first two months, but we also might want to make sure that those first 20 hours of instruction (the first month and a half minus necessary English in the first week to set the table) are done 98% or more in the target language.
I know I know. 90% is what ACTFL says. It’s not enough in my view because that 10% of English does not take into consideration that we learn languages completely unconsciously and that is a lot of lost input, that extra 8-10 minutes per day. That is unnecessarily lost input, I might add, totally over 24 hours of instruction over the course of a year.
We don’t need 10% of our classes to be in L1. All our kids need is to focus on the message during the day, not the individual words, and the process of vocabulary selection and chunking into the deeper mind that occurs when they are asleep after hearing the language that day can work at a much more efficient level than with 10% interruptions.
No I don’t have any research to back that up. And I certainly won’t be able to do it myself at that level. I’m talking a good ball game here but I have a long way to go before I’m at 98% CI in the TL in my own instruction. But one can dream.
That’s why this is a blog for teachers and is not a research journal for educational researchers. We dream about what is possible*. We throw stuff up on the wall and some of it sticks. It’s not always pretty in there. It’s not neat. Teaching is just messy a lot of the time.
Anyway, I just want to bring up the twenty hours again. That was from whom? I have looked all through the comments and want to know who said that. Jody? chill?
The 20 hours thing is something I really want to explore this year. I have an insight that if we can just do the first 6 weeks in 98% TL we might be able to keep it going all year and if we don’t there is no way we are going to bump up to it.
So just to summarize the idea and give it an acronym or some name like the Many Twenty or the Plenty Twenty (throw me a bone here people):
So the question – for clarity – is: is it true that doing about a month and a half of classes at 98% in the TL with very few new words being introduced during class gets us past some kind of invisible vocabulary checkpoint where the kids have enough words to make our comprehension based instruction fly a lot higher than it did last year.
So I start class with Word Associations off the Word wall. (See TPRS Resources page of this site.) So THAT stuff, those few words they learn at the beginning of each class, they form an instant visible word bank for the class to pull words from into the CI.
So if you have taught “fish” as a Word Association and you ask who Jenny plays volleyball with, it’s obvious, class, Jenny places volleyball with a fish. It may not be some cuter word, but you are staying in the target language.
We can’t just bring in any word. This is one of the deepest things I have come to appreciate in the past five years about this work. If the kids don’t know it don’t use it, don’t allow ANY English (Blaine was right) and make them suggest cute answers from only words that they already know or can pull off the Word Wall.
When we circle with balls or whatever we circle with, books, hobbies, whatever, we then focus only on the key word we are using to talk about the kid’s sport, book or hobby. We don’t say a sentence or ask a question that does not have that word in it. This is so key. We just use the target we are working on.
If it is CWB, then it is what the kid does. If it is OWI, that goes a little wide but we keep that image simple. If it is PQA, we make them use the words they know off the wall or from CWB or OWI or whatever, but we do not introduce new words.
After those 20 hours, that month and a half – and this is the part I am interested in checking out as we begin the year – we see most wonderfully that there may be full or nearly full comprehension by all or most of the kids because we have limited our vocabulary so intensely in the first six weeks and once we get past those 20 hours that exponential curve might kick in, only because we waited. Even if it is just a geometric curve, I’ll take it.
THEN in that second month, because we have stayed in the TL with such discipline during the first month, we begin to experience what is so unique about this approach, when we have sheltered vocabulary sufficiently and gone full steam ahead all engines full out with grammar (defined here as correctly spoken language) – we experience that feeling of unexpected power like when a sailboat suddenly catches the wind it was trying for and we move forward at unexpected rates of speed. THAT is what we want, but we won’t have it if we fluck around with English.
We could write a grant and get some data cruncher to tell us about this idea, or, call me silly and old fashioned, I could ask teachers in this group to maybe consider checking into this as they start the year. I don’t know, though, it does seem a little odd to ask such a question of practicing teachers in the classroom when I could be asking a computer. What was I thinking?
*Soren Kierkegaard put it this way:
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.”