Barbara Vallejos is our esteemed colleague here at Lincoln High School in Denver. She has used CI and TPRS for almost 20 years now and quietly sets a standard for the rest of us in our department. Today a student in her Spanish level 3 class asked her after class, “Why am I still translating? Why do I not just understand it?”
Barbara’s response to the student was brilliant. She said, “It’s because I am not giving you a Spanish 1 text to read, which you would read easily without translating…” and then she added, “…but if I gave you a text to read that is too difficult, with too many new words in it, you wouldn’t understand it at all.”
Then Barbara told the student that she had only added a few new words to the reading, just a few, and so that was why the student was still doing some translating, and why she didn’t just automatically understand it like she would a level 1 text. To say again, Barbara added just a few new words to the reading.
(Of course anyone reading this who has been to a national conference knows that this is exactly what we all have learned from Laurie Clarcq and Michelle Whaley about embedded reading. There is a category here on embedded readings.)
So to recap:
Barbara planned this reading class today in such a way that she gave the child a text that she could read easily, but that was not too easy. Again, why did she do that? Because, to repeat, if the text was too easy she would learn nothing new.
She would read, the text would seem like a movie in her mind (Susan Gross), but the unconscious mind would largely be doing the work of making the movie out of the reading, and without that little bit of conscious struggle, there would be no new learning because no new words.
And then, if the text was too hard, the conscious mind would step in to do battle with the new words and the unconscious mind would be cut out, and when the unconscious mind is removed from the process of learning a language, we have no learning of the language, as per Krashen:
…language is acquired through comprehensible input. It is an unconscious process that happens when the learner is focused on the message, rather than the language itself….
Note that everything that applies to this example about reading applies as well to how we speak to our kids when we use auditory CI. Our speech, just like the reading, must not be too easy, because then the students would not be pushed to understand more and learn new words and they would stagnate at that lower level of speech, but it should not be too hard, because then they would understand very little of what we said, kick in their conscious mind horses, which would soon shut down out of exhaustion.
This “place” between easy and effortless and natural comprehension of either reading or speech (a process that is unconscious) and the effort to grasp material that is too difficult and new (a process that is conscious) is where i + 1 lies, as I understand it.
We have arguments about i + 1 here in DPS. Big arguments. In bars. But having heard Barbara’s answer to this student who asked why she still had to translate in level 3, I get a clearer picture of it.
What I understand is that there is a zone, a place that is connected very much to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, where the child is constantly hearing a mix of compelling speech from mom, some of which she understands and some of which she doesn’t understand, while constantly wanting to learn more.
The Zone of Proximal Development is where i + 1 hangs out. It is a pure place of pure learning. It has nothing to do with lesson plans or word lists or pacing guides or schools in any way at all. It has nothing to do with principals. It is a zone where the kid is being spoken to or reading at just the right level for them, a level which is good for them.
This point addresses why some students don’t understand what we do in our classes. It isn’t because we aren’t enforcing the rules or jGR or whatever in these cases; it’s because our students need first and foremost for us to be in that place that Barbara reached today with her student between too easy and too hard.
We miss the target. We miss that zone where i + 1 hangs out. We miss our goal of speaking to our students in a way that is interesting to them and in a way that they can understand with very little conscious effort, but that requires them to do just a little work, just enough to teach them something new so that they can indeed make gains in the language.
We must speak to them in the story at the level they need to be spoken to. We must offer them readings that are at the level they need to be able to comprehend with a little bit of effort, but not too much, to avoid shut down.
So now I have learned from Barbara that I must be constantly monitoring my own speech to include nothing that they don’t already know except the few new items (target structures, words on CWB cards, etc.) that I am introducing that day.
Seen in that light, going out of bounds and using Point and Pause too much is a serious offense against our students. (One could make a case for the use of the word egregious here.)
I suggested to Suzanne this morning that one way out of the October Collapse is to read. I suggested that not only because I think it is easier in October to read, but also because in reading, if we but choose the right text, we can relax through the class, conserving energy for our other classes, while at the same time watching our students pay attention in spite of themselves, because we found the sweet spot in our instruction: i + 1.
That is why Blaine and other authors take such pains to make sure that the books they write make the students ask questions like the one asked to Barbara in that level 3 class today.
What is the right level of new speech? What is the right book? It is the one that they understand easily, and in which there are just enough new words, maybe 1 or 2 out of 15 (certainly not more than 3!) to make the students do a little bit of conscious translation and a lot of unconscious movie making of the text, so that they are using their conscious minds just a little bit, and that is how they learn.
