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Use of Story Scripts
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18 thoughts on “Use of Story Scripts”
I do get inspiration for my stories from vocabulary in novels, though, like you I find there is way too much vocabulary to pre-learn it all. The good news is that novels are full of high-frequency vocabulary. And that is what students need for communication, whether conversations, story-asking, or reading. So wherever we get our inspiration for stories, we need to be sure students are learning high-frequency vocabulary. They’ll get enough reps, because they will see those words wherever they go.
What you’re describing, Ben, is exactly the problem Latin teachers have using TPRS with the Cambridge Latin Course. By around chapter 5 or 6, the vocabulary just becomes too much. Keep in mind that “doing TPRS scripts” for words takes a lot longer than just one class period. A whole TPRS cycle takes at least one week, if not two like many here are now doing! So three new words every week, not every day. So over 4 nine week periods that’s a max of 108 words.
Of course that’s no where near enough to read a novel. Even the base “level 1” novels have upwards of 300 unique words.
For this reason my ideal vision of a curriculum is two years of TPRS–with PQA, asking a story, and readings FROM THOSE STORIES–almost exclusively, with other forms of CI thrown in as appropriate (CWB, songs, L&D, Y&D, etc.). Then in year 3 students can start to read those “level 1” readers with a solid grasp of vocabulary. Imagine! Being able to pick up the book and actually read it like English!
Note: In years 1 and 2 the readings from the stories, for Step 3 of TPRS, can themselves be written in order to prepare students for the novels they will eventually read. Those Step 3 Readings can introduce new vocabulary and conventions peculiar to writing. But even with all of that I would be hesitant to say a typical class could actually acquire more than 150-200 unique words during the first year of language study.
James said:
…for this reason my ideal vision of a curriculum is two years of TPRS–with PQA, asking a story, and readings FROM THOSE STORIES–almost exclusively, with other forms of CI thrown in as appropriate (CWB, songs, L&D, Y&D, etc.). Then in year 3 students can start to read those “level 1″ readers with a solid grasp of vocabulary. Imagine! Being able to pick up the book and actually read it like English!….
I agree, with one added point. Below, John mentions that reading novels can be a good thing to do in spring when kids are burnt out on stories. We have to take that into consideration. If that weren’t true, I would embrace exactly what you said above as my plan. And we in fact would rip through a novel like Houdini, if it were started in year three, in a very short period of time. Like, three days. For real. As you describe above. Without having formally targeted any structures. It’s like I asked Krashen what if I only spoke to them for the entire first year, no writing, no reading, no targets, just plenty of transparent spoken CI in stories, and he shook his head up and down like it was a perfectly reasonably idea. Diana doesn’t agree, but we all don’t agree on everything in DPS.
But just to repeat – what John said about spring is the deal breaker on that idea of no novels until level 3. I just told Lavinia today that my plan these days with novels is limited to:
Pauvre Anne in spring of level 1
Houdini in winter of level 2
Voyage de sa Vie in spring of level 2 or even in level 3 in the fall.
Three books in two years or two and a half years. Fine with me. We have some young cowboy teachers in DPS who do 8 novels in two years. Hey, that ain’t happening with me. I’m a Matava person.
So I will just add a quick comment that not teaching all or most of the words in a novel allows students to use reading strategies to figure out what words mean. One of our fix-up strategies is to find a category: is it a food? an item of clothing? a person? If they can figure that out, they can continue reading and they can develop reading skills that they will need in future WL classes and in real life. A pretty important skill, I think, and most of the novels allow for that kind of skill development.
Dori,
you wrote: “not teaching all or most of the words in a novel allows students to use reading strategies to figure out what words mean”
I think it is a very interesting point to ponder on. It is after all one of the strategies used by many Language Arts teachers to teach kids how to navigate the reading comprehension maze.
I wonder though how relevant and applicable those strategies might be for reading in L2? My gut feeling tells me no but I’m not sure.
For instance, a strategy used by many L2 teachers is to look for cognates.
I find that strategy not very helpful b/c often the students don’t see or recognize cognates unless you specifically point them out to them. And depending on what L1 they have , cognates may differ from a language to another.
That question would be a great question for Krashen since he has done so much research in the field of reading and SLA. I’ll write it down and I’ll ask him this summer.
Your points also reminds me of ESL students. I remember reading that ESL students who are literate in their L1 learn how to read in L2 faster and easier than students who are illiterate. So may be the techniques are useful if you have a literacy base in your own language, therefore varying from student to student.
But it may also have to do with the fact that academic language ( the language needed to read in high school and college) is kind of a universal language.
Dori, thank you for allowing me to try and think about this fascinating topic of reading that is still a big mystery, but gets easier as great points like the one you wrote about are just brought to our attention!
Or worse, Ben. What if a teacher has 4 preps and 6 classes like I do? It is like water boarding. I can barely keep up. I constantly feel like I am drowning. It is so difficult.
jeff
No answers, just sending empathy to you… have courage and keep going! I constantly feel like I am treading water too. Keep your head up and know you are making a difference. Someone somewhere wrote that the worst TPRS/CI class is still better than the best explicit grammar-driven class… that gives me hope. Summer will come… we will survive!
I can empathize as well. I too have 4 preps and 6 classes.
I first heard this quote in the context of: “your worst CI class will be better than your best grammar-translation class,” and I have had many days which show the truth of that phrase. Not only is a CI class helping your students acquire more of the language, but it involves less busywork and prep from the teacher. Giving the kids jobs such as writing quizzes and writing down stories (even on a computer) not only helps them stay focused, but also reduces your prep time. Transferring the onus of certain administrative details to your students actually helps them learn language more efficiently, because you have given them a larger share of ownership of the class. I teach fewer classes and fewer preps than most of you, and this allows me NOT to implement many of the strategies that would be absolutely essential if I were as burdened as many of you are. Don’t feel guilty about going easy on yourselves in these ways–doing these kinds of time saving things will in fact make you a more effective teacher.
Multiple preps for multiple classes is simply reality for many of us. Most German teachers I know have the full program on their own. I have five preps and five classes.
Voice of experience: do what you can with the time you have and do not – I repeat, do not – beat yourself up for being unable to accomplish the impossible. Also, take time for yourself*. Remember that not everything you assign must be graded. Grading does not mean correcting errors; most students will never even look at the corrections, and studies indicate that even if they do it will make little or no difference in their learning or acquisition of the language. Grade holistically. (If you need justification, it’s the way the AP essays are now being graded.)
*An old anecdote that illustrates this (I seem to be on a roll with anecdotes and aphorisms today):
Two lumberjacks were working together felling trees. The older lumberjack stopped from time to time while the young lumberjack continued working diligently. At the end of the day the older lumberjack had accomplished more work, so the young man asked him how he had done this while taking so many breaks. The older lumberjack said, “I used the time to sharpen my axe and give my body a rest. You wound up with a dull axe and a tired body, so you couldn’t accomplish as much.” Moral: Keep your axe sharp and your body refreshed; in the long run, you’ll get more done.
Me too, 5 preps, 5 classes. I used to have 4 preps & 4 classes, but those days are no more at my school. I have been learning some of the lessons you mentioned, Robert. I would say for some classes to put forth effort, letting them know that anything could be graded is a good idea.
I agree, Diane. Everything is potentially gradable, just not actually graded.
I really feel like I am bouncing back and forth in my opinion of novels–but in the abstract, because there are no easy Latin novels out there, but a number of us are toying with the idea of creating them. You mentioned elsewhere, Ben, that novels are really not the answer, and that they don’t compare with stories that students have helped to create. I agree. But novels seem great for Spring, when students have acquired a base vocab that will (hopefully) allow them to read a novel without too much difficulty (especially by the end of year 2), and they and we need something to keep them more grounded as their attention flies out the window.
In the meantime, a few of us Latin teachers are creating embedded versions of the textbook stories, so we can help our students experience this process of reading an extended narrative in Latin, before they have the vocab to read the textbook version (and James is right, that after chapter 5 they have to be 3rd year to really do this with the textbook).
The nice thing is that Matava and Tripp scripts have a lot of overlap with those high frequency words that occur in year 1-2 textbooks, so even if you are not “Targeting” specific vocab–which can really kill a lesson–you are still likely to have a lot of those words in “the net” by the time students pick up a novel or a textbook in the Spring of year 1 or 2.
I see the novels shining in years 3 and 4, when the class can shift to tons of R&D. Upper level language classes are all about reading and discussing literature in L2, no?
My opinion lately is that novels are very good. I think that is a wonderful idea that your district has Ben. Heck, most districts around the country don’t even deal with TPRS let alone novels! so I think your are in a great district that is helping kids. That is not happening out here in California let me tell you. Anyways there are a lot of words to do but many of the words if not most of them can be TPR’d. Words like like look, look for, buy, says, book, ect. There are a lot of them. Using TPR in one class period can result in getting maybe 10 words done or more. So I think it can be done and I think it is valuable to do it that way since novels are an ongoing story that will give the kids a lot of reps and a lot of CI.
What is matava?
I did Berto y Sus Buenas Ideas with my beginners after 35 contact hours. In Spanish, there are enough cognates that the kids don’t need to know 300 words– there are probably 200 “purely” Spanish words and the rest conext-guessable. Eg a sentence says “Voy al estadio Santiago Bernabeu para ver futbol” and the kids can figure out from context that “estadio” means “stadium.”
I read a Krashen piece recently where he wrote that a bit of “noise” was not a bad thing: if the kids get 85% of the vocab then they can either guess/ignore the rest.
I like the novels because the Blaine materials (“what? ANOTHER story about a cat who needs an iPhone?”) get repetitive and I don’t have the energy to write up all the stories we create in class.
I see the benefits of teaching with CI for helping students be more comfortable guessing at meaning based on context, or at ignoring words they don’t know (if they can more or less understand anyway). Before CI students would derail when they saw an unfamiliar word. They’d stop. Now they skim over and find the words they do know much, much more readily. I think they even enjoy being able to guess at the whole meaning without knowing all the characters. That skill of estimating/ignoring is hugely important in reading Chinese where you must be fairly advanced before you can estimate meaning/pronunciation from unfamiliar characters.
I think it’s about the shift from focus on discrete language pieces (the characters and memorizing them consciously) to the focus on meaning. Now they look for meaning primarily. It’s a pay-off from CI instruction over the course of this school year that I hadn’t expected or heard about for Chinese, as far as I can remember. I am pretty sure other Chinese teachers must experience it, too. I find it REALLY exciting.
A Matava is a wonderful person who wrote/writes story scripts for all of us to use and enjoy ;-). She’s on this PLC as well and you’ll probably find her bio in the “group members” section.