Our first goal this is year is to challenge unconscious teaching assumptions. I was thinking there about how we keep teaching to their conscious minds, involving them consciously against all the best research and what we have proven in our classrooms to be true about the supreme and majestic role of the unconscious mind in learning languages.
But here is another unconscious teaching assumption to look at: we think that they can read when they can’t. Let me challenge that one in this post.
The back story is housed in this question today from Melissa:
…I felt that with first year they couldn’t really take advantage of the FVR time. There were a few that loved it but I stopped using it because I believed that the loss for the others was not worth the time….
I advocate and support no FVR in level 1 classes. I junked it three years ago and Melissa just junked it. We probably did that because it doesn’t work and wastes time. Why? The kids can’t read in level 1 because:
1. They can’t read in the TL. They haven’t heard the language enough. Currently we in TPRS ask, and have asked for years, that our first year students start reading based on, say in November, fifty hours of auditory input. The auditory input so necessary to create kids who can read has, moreover, been lessened, ironically, by time spent doing reading before they are ready.
2. They can’t read in their first language very well anymore. Media has assured that. Another thing that has assured that kids can’t read is that our classrooms now contain, in the new minority majority America, millions of kids who haven’t had the chance to gain reading command of their first language let alone a third. I won’t even mention the abject failure of output oriented ELA programs constantly and continually ruining the interest of kids in reading in their new L2, English, so that kids taking a foreign language as a third language have this kind of enmity toward reading put in them from the crap ELA programs out there now. It is to me – and this is all my own opinion, of course – a sad thing that the ELA models out there right now, with their sad embracing of forced verbal and written output too early, and their inability to make the class personalized to the interests of the kids, are more married to corporate book publication interests than they would care to admit.
3. Time is so limited as touched on in (1) above.
4. Most school settings ignore the hormone case factor. It affects quiet reading activities in class. We don’t seem to take that into consideration.
5. Krashen’s research wasn’t done on people who had 45 minute periods to learn the language and ten minute periods to do FVR. I want to ask him about that. He knows we do ten min. of FVR in DPS but does he think it works? It doesn’t matter. He told me that WE are the ones to test his ideas in the classroom. There Melissa and I tested it. FVR doesn’t work in ten min. bursts.
6. The kids are sick of being told to shut up and do something in their classes all day. They want to visit. They want to be a person. They want to engage with others. They don’t want to fill out any more worksheets or read some book.
7. In spite of herculean efforts in Denver Public Schools over the past six years or so to apply novels/chapter books to our level 1 programs, with all sorts of side bars including huge amounts of times isolating and targeting vocabulary, lining up frequency lists with other lists, doing backwards planning on the novels, etc. – we still don’t get that much back for all that time invested. I would like to know what Ray Bauer says about this. Do you do this Ray?
8. Novels cost a lot of money for classroom sets. A classroom set of four novels (recommended in DPS for a typical level 1 class)would cost a school at least $600 – $700. What if we could do without that expense?
So beginners can’t read because they can’t read.
The opposite is true for upper level FVR. Here is what Melissa asked:
…[in upper level classes] last year my students always asked for more [FVR] time. A couple of times they wanted to read all hour. Is this a poor use of time?…
No, absolutely not. In upper levels they want to read more because they can read more. Call me crazy. Why can they read more? Because of all the highly personalized and therefore much more interesting auditory input and readings that happened that were based on stories over at least two years. That auditory input and the gentle and easy and much more compelling readings from stories (Step 3 of TPRS) set the table for them. Why gentle and easy and more compelling? Because the kids created them!
Infants listen. Our level 1 kids are infants. Then someone reads to them (if they are lucky) and then they start looking at pictures of beach balls, but the word “ball” is there printed under the picture and so it gets picked up and moved into the unconscious language traffic in the LAD/unconscious minds of our students. (We learn languages unconsciously but few of us even in this group who walk the walk end up walking it fully and that is why I am suggesting this first big goal for us this year of challenging unconscious teaching assumptions.)
This challenge to all that we have held near and dear to our hearts over many years, that early reading of novels needs to be blasted out of the TPRS bedrock for level 1 classes, would imply that we get better at doing stories. OK. Let’s do that!
Back to how kids learn to read, which directly bears on this discussion. After the kids create the image of the ball and make the unconscious associations between the image and the written word, they then start to read and then they read really simple books (we have none, maybe Brandon Wants a Dog) and then it all begins and they read more and more as they grow up but that kind of reading represents and reflects thousands and tens of thousands of auditory input and unconscious absorption of written messages over years and years that we don’t have, so what are we doing with the minute number of hours available to us?
So we force reading too early and no one is saying that. So I am saying, Melissa, to heavily limit not just FVR/SSR in level one classes but the reading of beginning novels as well. Don’t tell Carol or Blaine I am saying this. I say this because beginning novels are not beginning novels for beginners; they are complicated novels for the reasons listed above and I bet there are more such reasons.
Going back to Carol’s last comment quoted here yesterday about reading you can see how far apart I am far from her on this point:
…it’s the teacher’s job to make the process of reading palatable, even to weak readers. Focus on the story and giving auditory reps of the language structures found in the reading….
But what if they can’t read?
…since you never needed support, you never really discovered the beauty or power of a good novel. (Good means compelling, comprehensible, high frequency factor and low unique word count and i+1)….
But how many of us have ever “really discovered the beauty or power of a good novel” in our level 1 classes? If you have, good on you. My kids were learning their third language and cann’t read in their second and third. So maybe I in my urban setting of poverty am off on this point. Maybe there are great suburban classes out there with rockin’ reading classes of Piratas. What do I know?
So I guess I should say that novels suck for me in the early levels. Maybe Pobre Ana is a great work of fiction and I haven’t noticed it because for me in my own experience ALL novels suck in beginning levels, again, for the reasons listed above. (I have taught Pobre Ana for fourteen years and when we get past the first two chapters and all the creative parallel questioning I felt like I was leading my students into a corn field on a hot day to wander around in misery until the book was over – that was before I realized I could just quit reading the book and the TPRS police would not arrest me and take me to TPRS jail.)
Melissa’s is the first comment I have read in support of these ideas about reading. The statement from Diana in DPS has always been more reading early on. I feel like Rodney Dangerfield here.
Just to clarify for any for the newer people reading here, in TPRS we read in two ways:
1. We read stories created in Step 2 of TPRS – that is Step 3 reading, and
2. We read beginning level chapter books/novels.
Those reading a lot here lately have heard me in recent months suggest more and more readings based on stories for level 1 classes, especially with our new interactive whiteboard options to create the kind of readings that our kids can really enjoy and in their baby reading way embrace in the real way, as real beginners not capable of reading novels in level 1 (and in my opinion right up to second semester of level 2).
And one could ask if “not being gifted at asking stories” is even an excuse to read more novels before the kids can actually read them? That thinking kind of smells to me. I think it’s about getting better at telling stories. We can do it, and I wouldn’t have said that two months ago but what I saw in the two national conferences bolstered my belief in what many newer teachers are doing with stories, which is basically kicking ass with them. Then we can rock the house with more and more Step 3 readings (and more and more interactive whiteboard fun, cooling it on the novels, and generally roll our CI trains further and faster up the hill to true acquisition.
The idea here that I am trying to present is that Step 3 reading of stories (using ROA) and reading novels (using R and D) are NOT equal options in level 1. In fact, I am suggesting that Step 3 reading should PRECEDE all novel reading. Does anyone agree with me at all? Buehler? Buehler?
The kids, like Buehler, always convey that they are getting more than they are anyway, and now with the vice of media on the kids, that modern day harpie, they have trouble reading in their own language. Why are we still pushing reading at lower levels in second and third languages when they can’t read in their first?
And yes Melissa, to respond in the clearest way to your question, when they want to read for an hour, that is a sign that you are definitely doing something right. That is applied Krashen 101. Do that for sure at the upper levels. Let them read all week if they want.
Experienced kids can read because they can read. Beginning kids can’t read because they can’t read.
