Our group member Melissa said:
I’m starting the year with the Circling with Balls activity. It’s going great in Spanish 1, but with Level 3 I’m a little more concerned. These students haven’t had a TCI teacher before, but I’m starting much like my 1st years while mixing in different tenses (did you play ___ yesterday? …when you were a little girl? …will you play it this weekend? …would you play with Tony Hawk? etc.) but I’d like to know what you do with upper levels.
I responded:
Melissa in my opinion the kids really have to have had CI training when younger. I find that kids who are new get it, and that kids who are not new do not want to get it. Understandably, they want their language instruction to resemble what it was for them before. Their refusal to “go there” into play and into giving you cute answers is strong and almost scary. They don’t want to accept a way of experiencing the language that is different from what worked for them so easily before. I had this problem in my old school once – that hell state is written up here as a blog or blog comment, somewhere (anybody know where?). My hell state was with a 4th level class that could not and would not muster the good will to play Circling with Balls or anything else that was in fact working beautifully with my 1st year students. They played dumb. Why? Because they ARE dumb in the sense that they don’t want to experience anything new. The pushback was worst from the seniors, less from the juniors, and the sophs in that fourth year class were the only open ones. I never broke through into that class all year. I look back and realize that my mistake was clearly in breaking back into L1 too much with them. I should have hit them first with One Word Images (this site/resources/workshop handouts) and made them help me make the Circling with Balls work too. I didn’t enforce the rules (this site/posters) and I let them draw me into English. OMG. So Melissa I don’t know – you may have to avoid the CI altogether if you sense that these kids have lost their ability to play, to suggest cute answers, to make things up as we do in this fine art that we call teaching using CI. I suggest that seriously. The work of changing their way of thinking is not worth your effort and, in my case, the sleepless nights. It is so different when they are so resistant because when you speak to them at the same speed and with the same content as your level 1’s they feel stupid and shut up and try to get you to stop and teach them some grammar. They don’t want to be required to show up in a reciprocal/participatory way with you – they never had to before and they got A’s for basically doing nothing. Inside, they KNOW that they know no language in terms of the Proficiency Guidelines and all things communicatory, if that is a word. And there you are outing them for not really having accomplished much – no blame; it’s not their fault – in those two first years. They don’t want you to find out how little they know. Can we leave it where it is and just make contact whenever you feel like you need to talk about it? There is going to be no easy answer to this one. This is going to be one of those learn by doing deals, and many of us in this blog community are going to be right there with you because a lot of us are going to be in similar situations this year, even with level 2 kids. It’s just so odd that nobody seems to want to give up the easy English dominant learn nothing but memorize a few verbs crap thing that they were allowed in their first years, which made real acquisition impossible for them because of the raw sewage in their minds about how their language class is supposed to work. I will post this right now. My own fourth year group literally knew no French and they knew it and they knew I knew it when I started to speak with them – so of course kids will try to hide it by putting the screen savers up. Even their grammar, which is all they had done, was totally screwed up and mixed up. That class was a bunch of poster children for Krashen. Oh well. Rant over. So, to the group it goes! STAY IN TOUCH WITH US ON THIS ONE. It is going to need monitoring. Thanks!