So within the vast Realm of PQA we have all sorts of things we can do. (I just don’t think we should use PQA to set up a story.) We can put up an image and then talk about it, and relating it to (comparing and contrasting) our students’ lives. We call that Look and Discuss. We can do that with a video clip and call it Watch and Discuss or MovieTalk.
We can do Read and Discuss in the same way with a paragraph or chapter from a novel. We can do Listen and Discuss where we listen to a song and talk about it.
There are lots of ways to take ANYTHING in our work with CI and expand on it and relate it to our students’ lives, keeping the discussion personalized and lighthearted, which sets our way of teaching apart from everything else.
We can even discuss a sentence that we ask them to translate! Here is a sequence that can eat up an entire block, like it just did for me. I had intended to start class with a quick sentence translation and then onto something else, as a way of eating up the first ten minutes of class, but it just took off in the following way:
- Right before class I was talking with a teacher in the hallway and she mentioned this video to me and sent it to me:
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=2764
I had time to watch it before class. I immediately saw it as a way to continue my grammar theme this week of how reflexive verbs (my favorite) work.
- I wrote this sentence on the board:
“Do you think that trees speak to each other under the ground?”
- Next to the sentence, I added in a list each word they would need to translate the sentence, with the English.
- I gave them a few minutes to write their version in their composition books, which are kept in the classroom.
- I wrote the correct version on the board and explained the grammar, getting my grammar yah-yahs out. Of course they were into it because they like to see if they got it right and also because they (wrongly but who cares bc this work is all about self-care first and anything else second) thought that they were learning.
- I have two plants by my desk and started circling, asking non-stop highly sheltered questions about the sentence I was circling. Then I brought the discussion into a series of questions about my students using the same vocabulary as I used in the original translation sentence: Do they talk to each other? Do the plants near my desk speak to me when I am at my desk? (One does and one doesn’t.) Do they speak to each other through their leaves? Through the air? Then I asked the kids questions about whom they talk to, etc. It’s just asking questions.
- “Do you speak to each other?” became a review of “listen”, “hear”, and “wait”. Since I had circled those three verbs in generalized PQA in a class last week for at least 45 minutes, the kids were able to “go there” with me.
- After that, I showed the video, stopping it like we do in MovieTalk.
So this work is not about having a prepared lesson. It never was. It is about having something interesting to look at, listen to, read, and even translate, and then expanding it into a general discussion and then, as in this case, as a kind of bonus, connecting it so some existing thing, the video. The video wasn’t even in French. I just turned the sound off for the discussion.
My point is that if we can’t keep ourselves open to new things as they present themselves to us during our teaching day and if we feel that we have to teach the same stuff all the time, there will be no spontaneity in our work. I don’t want that, personally.