Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Upper Level Reading
Share:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Ben Slavic
Get The Latest Updates
Subscribe to Our Mailing List
No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.
Related Posts
CI and the Research (cont.)
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Research Question
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
We Have the Research
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
17 thoughts on “Upper Level Reading”
This to me points out the utter challenge many of us face in rethinking how we teach. Not only do we have to learn new stuff, new ways of thinking, new concepts (e.g. you can’t learn a language by analyzing it with the conscious mind, desks aren’t helpful, etc. etc.). Now we are starting to see that reading “challenging” texts, which makes so much sense to us as teachers and four percenters, brings less gains than reading texts that DON’T challenge our students. When and where will this shift end?
Our work is really about building self-esteem over all else. TCI/TPRS clicks with any teacher who gets this. That requires a shift in our role and relationship of teacher to student from the traditional paradigm. To some I am sure it sounds too “touchy-feely.” A TCI class reminds me of the morning meeting, community-building times that start the day.
I have been reading a challenging novel for my upper level students and it has been a bear. I spend more time trying to explain then just asking questions and going into personalization of the text. This is my first year using novels so it’s all trial and error. I’ll go with what is good for my mental health which will be positive for the students. I can reflect later and go from there for next year. For me the whole experimental experience is fun. I pretty much stay with Blaine’s steps so the students are acquiring. The novels will fine their place in my home, just haven’t figured it out yet.
I read somewhere (Krashen?) that ppl need to comprehend 90+% of a text to be able to read it on their own and 75%+ for R&D.
This idea dovetails nicely with research I’ve read about where mixing level 1s and 2s in CI class benefits upper kids a ton. No such things as too many reps.
I am buying more beginner novels so next Fall I can do independent reading. Berto y sus Buenas Ideas would work great for level 2s to read on their own.
This is really a good idea, Chris. I feel like you’re right on the money.
Because of this post I used a beginner text in Spanish II class tonight and the students understood at well over 90 percent on the first try. My courses are going to be designed around this idea of high-comprehension reading from now on.
Reading novels and listening to speech at a 90%+ level will lead to greater acquisition in the long run. Most will still get i + 1 from readings like this, and I feel like we can keep adding to their acquired language with stories by targeting some new sounds and structures.
At the Maine conference, Laurie Clarcq had a powerful way to make this point. She projected a recipe in English, but with 50% of the words missing (blanks), then 60%, 70%, etc. The question was: Could you follow the recipe? Even with 90% of the words in English, unless you have a lot of background in cooking, it could still be challenging.
That is how our kids feel when they can’t figure out a word, as if the word was a blank. Actually, if it were a blank it would probably be better. Since the kid sees a Spanish word he can’t figure out, this can also impact his Spanish self-esteem. He may be frustrated or conclude that he doesn’t know/can’t do Spanish. I think TPRS has always understood that a kid’s confidence is a priority if we are to develop fluency.
I ask myself: What would I love to be able to do with Latin? Answer: Read something interesting that I can understand easily and then talk a bit about it with others who are of like mind. Thus arises my ideal upper level curriculum.
I recently posted on Latin Best Practices that I am planning to do stories and CI for the first two years rather than try to incorporate the book from the beginning.
I have really felt that stories and other CI is so much more powerful than trying to fit a textbook to CI. We can make it work, but it doesn’t have bite. The first book of the Cambridge series is really good and I have seen my level III students read it and really read it. In my mind, we cannot ask our students to read this vocabulary laden texts without hearing and reading our texts first.
Here is what I am planning to do. Years 1 & 2: CWB, TPRS, OWI, L&D, R&D with our stories, textivate, timed writes, and other blue chip ideas.
After the second year, I will give them the textbook in year three and let them read it. We can then do R&D with it. PQA with the verbs from the text, tell a parallel story off it. We can do this first book for the first semester. Proceed to the second book in 2nd semester.
In levels 4/5, we can try reading the 3rd book, maybe a bit more closely. I’don’t know yet. We’ll have to see how it goes, but I realy feel better about this idea.
It works so much better for me if I just grab a script and adapt it for Latin and go. I really think that we could use a book of Latin friendly scripts that are geared to power verbs. Bob recently put us teachers on a project of coming up with the 50 most important Latin verbs. Maybe this project will produce some scripts and some short stories/novels for the first years and second year.
jeff
“I have really felt that stories and other CI is so much more powerful than trying to fit a textbook to CI. We can make it work, but it doesn’t have bite.”
Absolutely, Jeff. This is why I’m arranging completely to dump the textbook starting next school year. I’ll have parents buy readers instead of a thick, unwelcome textbook. I’m looking forward to that.
Yes James, I really resonate with this. To enjoy reading, just as you say, and to enjoy as well the resultant discussion in L2. That would be fun! What would NOT be fun would be the feeling that gripped me in graduate school and really all through my schooling – that on some level I needed to work really really hard to be able to get into the club of cool people who know what I didn’t know in whatever class it was.
With statements like yours, we are now, in my view, slowly crawling out of an entire mindset that our students can be wrong, and so, when we offer our students things that they can handle easily, we bring a more round table approach/mentality into our classroom. This changes everything at a profound level. It brings freedom from the chains that have kept us thinking for centuries that learning is about struggle. It’s not, and never was.
Are there any videos of teachers reading novels with their classes? I think it would help to see it in action. I find several are bored and I am not sure how to capture their interest. I have been limiting novel reading to 25 minutes or so and doing something else the other part of the hour and this has helped a lot but am interested where I should go from here to educate myself on this process even more.
Melissa there is this below, but it is a video of ROA (Reading Option A, which is used to process readings made from stories as opposed to readings of a novel, which uses R and D in the system I use).
However, the two are very similar. So you may want to look at these three links. The first two are links to a video of a reading class at East High School using ROA, and the other is a link to a description of what ROA is and how it works:
http://www.schooltube.com/video/261b4062782dc52df5e2/Ben%20Slavic%20Teacher%20Commentary%20Reading%20Part%201-4
http://www.schooltube.com/video/d64f29ef5330c2c406ec/Ben%20Slavic%20Teacher%20Commentary%20Reading%20Part%205-7
https://benslavic.com/blog/reading-option-a-latest-update-2013/
In addition, I just videotaped today a few classes doing ROA on a story we created last week. I will try to get that processed in Vimeo asap. As I said above that whether it’s ROA with a story or R and D with a novel, the process is essentially the same and I think that watching this ROA video can help you with R and D readings.
The only problem in getting this new videotape published here on the PLC is time – it takes awhile to translate in the form of subtitles all the French and to also add a “director’s cut” track to explain what is going on. (I don’t know about you but this time of year seems really busy, busier than I remember! Ah, don’t we love January!)
These will be great to watch. Thank you for posting them. I will look forward to your new video when it gets posted as well but no rush. One amazing result of CI is less stress so more fun but there is always a stack of work left over. Of course it’s easier to smile as I tackle that stack of work when classes are so enjoyable.
Also I wasn’t sure if reading option A and R&D were similar or not so this answered another question.
I suggest comparing the characters in the reader to the kids in your class.
So if you read that Anne is 16 years old in the R part of R and D, you then circle the sentence “Anne is 16 years old” and then you go right into asking Sally and the other kids how old they are.
This doesn’t take them very far into any real interesting personalization, and humor may be absent, but it’s a start. Slowly, you will feel interest build in the class around something unexpected during that low level discussion, and it might even go up the taxonomy a bit. Stay with it, but don’t leave the original structure about how Anne is 16. Doing that confuses the kids.
Remember the underlying principle of this work, that we repeat target structures at all costs in every utterance, thus getting them to focus on the message and not the words, in effect tricking them into processing what you say on an unconscious level, banning their conscious analytical faculty from the room, so that they can acquire for real and not just learn.
Moving up to highly interesting and humorous discussion from a simple sentence like “Anne is 16” is a chancy thing. Normally it won’t go up, the kids will tell you their age, the bored looks on their faces will stay there, and (this is the beauty of R and D) you can stop and go back for another helping of D any time you get into one of those uncomfortable vapor locks when the discussion goes nowhere.
On Pauvre Anne, the first few chapters are chock full of D potential. Each sentence in those initial chapters can create some D. So it is a good book to use to learn R and D.
There are articles on this very question you ask Melissa. Maybe check the R and D category.
And don’t fear their bored looks. Just keep reading and if a moment pops up where you can ask the kids something relative to the text, do so. Twenty five minutes of that will go by fast.
And after that, if you have wisely employed your Quiz Writer to write down ten questions during the R and D part of class, you can just play the quiz card then and watch them pay more attention the next time you do R and D.
We must learn in this work to let the discussion flow naturally. Read, then discuss. Maybe a minute of reading followed by five seconds to five minutes or more of D. There is no formula. Trust that the discussion, if you keep mirroring the text over to the kids in the class, is bound to move up the taxonomy at some point or another. Feign interest. That helps. Personally I don’t care if Dan is 15 or 16. But I act interested. It’s all about them.
Just remember when you spin discussion in the D part to not go wide. That is, your questions should always have the original sentence (the last sentence you read before deciding to spin some D out of it) in it. That way, they know what you are talking about, because they just read it, their getting lots of reps of the target (“is ___ years old” in our example).
Do look through the R and D posts. There must be something here on that category.
I would just add that the interpersonal relationships in the first chapter are, as Ben said, “chock full of D potential”. Besides asking the dull and boring (but also valuable) questions about jobs – whose father is a mechanic? whose mother is a secretary? – you get to ask things like, who yells/scolds in the family? (It isn’t always the mother.) Do students yell at their siblings? Why do they yell? Who steals clothing? Who eats chocolate? Who eats fruit? Who won’t help? Who laughs at other members of the family? These are the questions for which your students will begin to perk up – at least the ones that are comfortable enough to share and interested enough in other people to listen. I’m currently reading “Arme Anna” with my first-year students, and one girl said that her brother sometimes steals her clothes, especially for school “spirit days”. Everyone knows the guy from ASB, so we all got a good laugh about her yelling at him for stealing her clothes.
Today we had the same talk about taking clothes. The D part today used if a sibling helps or laughs when there is a problem. It was a lot of fun. After a section I had them draw the problem that Ana has with each member of the family and if the student didn’t know (this is because I don’t have a set of books) I told them again in Spanish until they remembered. I found this gave me many more reps with the structures with students that really needed it and with the students that didn’t pay attention. Also when I was telling a student about the problems with Ana’s family members other students helped explain in Spanish. It was great fun.
This is totally different than a high school class, but I’ve been reading too-hard material with a group of “Advanced” adults. I feel kind of guilty doing it because it may be counter to what I’ve learned from all of you. I still have a block against the little novels. If I ever get back into a high school classroom (ojalá), I will try to find ones that I can really get behind. Meanwhile, I’m on a campaign to enjoy teaching, so I’m just bringing in stuff that is deeply compelling to ME and walking through it as slowly as I dare, talking and clarifying and spinning whatever conversation comes up and then after we have made our way through the whole thing, we read it or listen to it again and by then it’s up to 90% comprehensible, at least that’s my hope. They are acquiring because they are understanding messages in the TL (right?) I don’t know if I’m short changing these people, but I do know that we are way over 90% in the TL for 90 minutes and people seem to be going home happy. I think it makes us all feel wicked smart to be reading Neruda’s memoirs and Esmeralda Santiago’s hilarious stories and interviews with Jasmine Garsd and Oscar Martinez, etc. The cultural discussions that come up are awesome, since all of these adults have huge life experience to share, and the language is BEAUTIFUL.