Sunday, December 30, 2012

Giving Private Lessons

A few years ago I refused to give private lessons.  Partly because I felt I needed all my energy for my regular classes and partly because I suspected private lessons would be boring.  For me and for the students.

Jokingly I said I was too much teacher for just one student.  It takes a certain amount of energy to confront a classroom filled with adolescents and channel all their emotions into a group activity. A good lesson involves a lot of interaction between students and the teacher, but also between the students. It's a challenge that can become an exhilarating drug when it goes well.  I couldn't imagine getting the same high from a private student.

Then life played one of its little jokes on me and the French Ministry of Education declared that they would kindly allow me to continue teaching to the age of 67, but then I would have to retire. If only I had had the forethought to lie about my age when I came to France, I would be getting a less miserly pension.  Since last June I've started taking on private students in order to supplement my income, and also because I don't feel ready to stop teaching.  I learn more from my students than they do from me and I'm convinced that every year I'm a better teacher than I was the year before.  To suddenly stop teaching and take up golf seemed a tremendous waste of everything I've learned in the last twenty years.

My first students were friends that knew me, then I began getting calls from people who saw my ads.  I now have about 30 students.  The youngest is in primary school and the oldest are retired.  Some are lycée students and some are adults who need English for their job or who want to be able to travel abroad.  The work is as varied as their expectations and motivations, and I find it very interesting.  I still miss the challenge of a class, but I have to admit that private lessons are much less stressful.  

Recently a friend asked me for advice because she's been asked to give private lessons.  I told her that I'm enjoying teaching with no discipline problems.  Basically, I plan what I want to talk about with my students, much as I would with a class, but I don't worry if we get side-tracked on something that particularly interests them.  It's personalization with a capital P.  I'm using Anne Matava's scripts but we also work on songs, learning the vocabulary with lots of PQA, or films.  Last week I gave two groups my recipe for a Christmas fruit cake.

I don't think that students have to have an advanced level to work with films.  We watch a scene with the subtitles in English (my target language), then we talk about it.  I tell stories, jokes, share my memories from growing up in the States or my life in Cameroon.  Basically, I see myself as being paid to have a conversation with my students and I try to make it interesting, to be a good conversationalist. 

Something that has worked very well is the graphic novel, "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. There are no words, but the pictures tell a complex and moving story.  We look at each page, describe the images and then talk about what we think it means.  It takes several lessons to work our way through the book and by then I have a good idea of where my students are at and where we can go next.

Basically, if we have faith in Krashen, we can ensure that our students will progress by simply chatting with them, verifying that they understand, translating when necessary so their affective filters stay down.  Today with a group of adults we watched a scene from Shawshank Redemption in which one of the characters said, "He should have died in here."  Spontaneously one of the students who would have tested as A2 last year translated the phrase "Il aurait du mourir ici." She did it without stopping to think and I was so proud of her.

I guess the extra, unexpected bonus with private lessons is that you come to know your students better than you can in a large classroom and they become your friends, people that you enjoy spending time with and look forward to seeing.





Saturday, December 29, 2012

How Do We Learn To Speak Another Language?

Stephen Krashen has been studying the question for almost his entire career.  His research gave birth to "The Natural Approach", which seems to be the starting point for a multitude of modern communicative methods that encourage the student to "just get on with it" and seem to assume that the most essential quality needed by a language student is willingness to speak.

Of course that is an exaggeration and a caricature of many interesting and progressive methods. Just as Krashen's ideas are frequently reduced to a caricature.  I heard one esteemed speaker call some of Krashen's proponents "the-talk-until-you-drop-school."

Those who advocate the "Natural Approach" assume that if a student hears enough language, he will be able to speak.  But many seem to have forgotten or chosen to ignore what Krashen said about "comprehensible input".  The teacher may very well speak in the target language 100% of the time, but if the students do not understand him, they are not receiving comprehensible input.  A more careful reading of Krashen suggests that language is acquired through an interactive negotiation of meaning.  The student has an important role to play, not by forcing himself to speak, but by signalling whenever he does not understand. Then the teacher must do whatever is necessary to make what she said comprehensible.  I don't have the reference at hand, but I read many years ago about a study that showed that while students forget most of what they are told by the teacher, they almost always remember the answers to their own questions. So I like to wait for students to ask questions, knowing that there's a good chance they'll retain my answer.

In an ever recurring debate on the moretprs forum about how much grammar explanation students need, someone suggested that there is a middle ground between all tprs and all grammar and vocabulary lists. I replied that there was once a debate about whether or not the world was flat and that there could be no middle ground about it.  If we believe that language is acquired through comprehensible input, we have to admit that grammar explanations in the native language are a waste of time and memorizing vocabulary lists in the short term memory are a waste of effort.  The words just aren't where we need them when we need them. 

Another teacher replied that adult learners can become very stressed when they are not given the grammatical explanations they crave, and that he thought there could be a balance between the two methods.  He also thought that teaching the grammar can help reduce the number of repetitions needed before a structure can be acquired.  This is my reply:

I'm afraid that when people say "middle ground" or "balance", they mean 50/50. I also have adult learners and mine are French, which means they went through the traditional learning process before it was called traditional because it was considered the only way to teach.  Occasionally I give them the grammar they request in order to lower their affective filter.  I'm able to do this in pop-ups and whenever they ask a direct question, I answer it. (Actually, I'm a reformed 4%er who used to pride herself on her "clear explanations" and loved linguistics, so I have to put on my grammar brake before their faces go green.)  I insist on meaning more than grammatical labels.  Very rarely, when I feel a certain level of frustration, I set aside an entire hour and I tell them, this is the only grammar lesson you are getting this year, so pay attention. And I draw a mandala with them as a graphic representation of the English verb system.  They carefully note everything and label all the parts and some of them actually keep it and refer to it from time to time, but my real aim is to convince them that the English verb system is completely different from the French, that there is no future, conditional or subjunctive as such, just different ways of expressing the same ideas.  So they will stop laboriously trying to find correspondences that don't exist.

I've noticed that after a while my adult students stop asking questions and start to relax and their expression improves.  I've also noticed that it's very much a question of personalities. In one of my groups there's a couple that traveled around the world and lived in the States for a while, but never studied English in school.  Obviously their English is acquired. Another woman studied German as her first foreign language, was a good student and could read an English text with a dictionary.  Another woman is dyslexic, failed English in school but many years later had an exchange student live with her for a short while and discovered that she was the only person in the family that could communicate with her.  There was only one that insisted on grammatical explanations.  I'll let you guess which one.  I gave them the one hour grammar lesson a year ago and they have never asked for more. They are now functioning as a fairly homogenous group and I can point out what would be considered advanced structures and they click immediately.

Of course there is a place for the monitor and that is in editing written work.  We now have the very interesting possibility of putting a student's written text on a smartboard and editing it with the class, discussing what is acceptable, what is incomprehensible, etc.  TPRS doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath. It means everything in its place.  Just as we aim at 95% target language use in a class, but accept translations when they are the most efficient way to give meaning to a new word or expression, I think the "balance" between Comprehensible Input and grammatical explanations should be about the same.  In TPRS grammar is called pop-ups and should last only a few seconds.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Teaching English in Cameroon

In 1967 I received a letter from the Peace Corps saying that I was accepted as a Volunteer trainee and assigned to teaching English in east Cameroon. I remember I had to look Cameroon up in the National Geographic collection of the Culver-Stockton library.  I discovered that it was in the crook of Africa. (Some people, referring to the hot, sweltering climate, say armpit.) And that it had giant frogs. This was where I thought I would spend the next two years of my life.  As it turned out, I spent seventeen years there before I moved on.

The Peace Corps training for our mission lasted three months.  The first month was in Boston where we were given French lessons eight hours a day, five days a week.  The lessons were designed for soldiers.  You learned a dialog by heart and then you were drilled on it.  It was repetitive, rapid-fire and mind numbing, but we were highly motivated and convinced this was the way to teach.

The second month was in Dartmouth, where we were given more French lessons, lectures about Cameroon, its history and social conditions and how to teach English as a foreign language.  I have retained very little of those lectures except that I was envious of the people assigned to West Cameroon because they were being given lessons in Pidgin English. At one point I was told to teach English to a family from Cambodia.  I was instructed not to use French and vaguely remember that they understood next to nothing of what I tried to teach them. From that experience I gained an immense respect for those who teach English to students with no common language.

For the third month we were sent to Quebec so we could practice our skills on French-speaking children. We were hosted by Canadian families as part of our immersion experience and I discovered that my Bachelor of Arts, French major, cum laude did not enable me to understand French Canadians. I remember very little about the lessons I gave or about my students, just that it all seemed very artificial.  I was pretending to be a teacher and they were pretending to be pupils.  I was speaking in English all the time and they were staring at me with bewildered looks.  I was told that a teacher had to speak only in the target language, but no one told me that you also had to be comprehensible.  I now know that history calls this "the Natural Approach".

Then we flew over the ocean and I eventually ended up in Kribi, Cameroon, a lovely little port on the Atlantic ocean. I was equipped with a bicycle to get to school, a thin, paperback textbook with dialogs, vocabulary lists and grammar exercises, a flannel blanket and cardboard cut out figures to illustrate the dialogs.  Since many of the schools had no reliable source of electricity, we hung the flannel blanket on the wall and stuck the cardboard figures to it to help our students visualize the characters' actions.

So my career as a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages began.  I had four classes, sixième, cinquième, quatrième and troisième. There were 60 twelve year olds in my sixième class.  The next grade had only 45, there were less than 30 in my quatrième class and less than 20 in my troisième class. I later discovered that students who had reached the troisième were considered scholars and some actually taught part time in the local primary schools.

It was a wonderful way to begin teaching.  Most green teachers are immediately confronted with discipline problems.  My students desperately wanted to continue their studies, knowing that education made the difference between comfort, even luxury, and severe poverty.  They wanted to learn English, the key to so many doors, especially in Cameroon where the two official languages are English and French, and they treated me with far more respect than I warranted.  For many of them I was the first white woman they had ever actually spoken with.

I remember one day I was teaching the sixièmes when a big tropical storm broke out.  The rain was coming down so hard that the noise on the tin roof drowned me out.  It was coming through the windows, which had no glass, only chicken wire, so we had to close the shutters.  There was one small naked light bulb, but the power was off because of the storm.  So there I was, in the dark with sixty pupils who couldn't see me or hear me.  Needless to say that I could see them even less because of their dark skins. I shouted at them to take out their notebooks and do exercise 4 in their books. There was not enough light to read by, but all sixty students took out their notebooks and pretended to do the exercise until the storm blew over and I could go on with my lesson.

With students like that, who needs to worry about teaching methods?   ........  (to be continued )

Thursday, December 20, 2012

A Visit from Saint Nicholas

The story behind the poem ....

When I was a little girl my mother bought Golden Books for me to read.  They were square little books of twenty or thirty pages stapled with cardboard covers.  And the one that I remember best was "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" with its illustrations of jolly Santa Claus putting gifts under the Christmas tree.

Later I read the poem to my younger brothers and sisters and later to my own children and grandchildren.  Today I recited it to my students. Because by now I know it by heart. And through the years, I've learned that there's more to the poem than appears.

When the poem was written, probably in the late 18th century, Christmas was not the holiday we know.  It was closer to our present celebration of New Year's Eve.  Groups of tipsy "carolers" expected drinks in payment for their songs and in the larger cities would accost strangers and become menacing if they weren't offered their "Christmas cheer".  This custom continued into the 19th century.  I read an account of an early school in Schuyler County, Illinois where the boys asked their teacher for whiskey to celebrate Christmas.  When he refused, they threw him out into the snow. Obviously they were big, husky farm lads.  When the teacher complained to the town authorities, he was told it was the local custom and it would be better to comply.

The knickerbockers of New York, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, preferred to stay home and celebrate a quiet family holiday.  Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, became an elf who came at night and put gifts and sweets in the children's stockings. And if we read the poem carefully, we can still see the "jolly old elf" who rides in "a miniature sleigh" with "eight tiny reindeer".  In spite of the illustrations in my Golden Book, there is no mention of a Christmas tree in the poem. 

A hundred years before the Coca-Cola advertizements, St. Nick was not dressed in red and white but in fur "from his head to his foot" and "his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot".  Didn't you always wonder how the Santa we see could stay so clean while going up and down all those chimneys?  A researcher has also pointed out that the Saint Nicholas in the poem has a working man's short pipe, "the stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth", whereas Haddon Sundblom, the artist who drew Santa for the Coca Cola company, showed him with a long curved pipe, like those smoked by wealthy New York burghers.  Coca-Cola did not invent Santa, he was here a hundred years before the soda, but they re-looked him.  The dirty little lower-class elf became a large, wealthy man who ran a toy factory where the elves worked for him.

Another little known fact about the poem is that it was not written by Clement C. Moore.  It was originally published in a book by him, but he gave its author as "anonymous".  When it became popular and everyone was reprinting it, his children insisted that he sign it.  For twenty years he refused, saying he had not written it.  He was annoyed that what he considered a trifle was drawing attention away from his more serious work. In fact, almost all of his poetry was gloomy and religious, bearing no ressemblance to the gay rhythm and heathen beliefs of "A Visit from Saint Nicholas." Before his death he finally agreed to acknowledge the poem as his own.

The children of Henry Livingston claimed that their father had written the poem for them and read it to them every Christmas, an entire generation before it was published.  The original copy which they possessed was burned in a fire, but there are plenty of clues in the poem itself to support their claim.  The first is the anapestic tetrameter of the poem, which Livingston often used for other poems and which Moore never used.

There is the fact that Livingston's wife slept with a kerchief on her head instead of the more usual night bonnet.  There are the names of some of the reindeer which correspond to the names of some of Livingston's horses.  His wife was from a Knickerbocker family and often said "Donner and Blitzen" as a mild cuss word. A maid who had worked for the Livingston's later became the nanny in Moore's household, so it is easy to see how he obtained the poem.

Of course, Livingston was not the last person to catch a glimpse of Saint Nicholas.  When my children were small, we had a friend who was tall, had "a little round belly" and whose hair was "as white as the snow".  We dressed him up as Santa Claus and told him to act like he was putting toys under the tree.  He had strict orders not to talk because he had a pronounced accent from southwest France.  I think Daniel and Joelle were three and four years old. We woke them up and let them peek around the door at him.  He walked off, down the lane, and the children went back to bed, still half asleep.  The next morning Daniel told us all about it and that he had seen Santa Claus fly off in his sleigh.

Today my grandson Elie is seven years old and still believes in Santa Claus.  At school there are boys who say he doesn't exist, but Elie knows better because last year he slept on the terrace on Christmas Eve and remembers seeing Santa Claus fly past the windows.  And this year, once again, I will recite "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" for my grandchildren, for my children and for myself, for all the wonderful memories it brings back to me.


A Visit from Saint Nicholas

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
And ma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

"Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid!  on Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.

His eyes-how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

Monday, December 17, 2012

26 Acts of Kindness

How do you respond to senseless violence?

When I first heard about the killings in Newton, Connecticutt, I was, of course, appalled.  I didn't want to know all the gruesome details, but it seemed almost impossible to escape hearing more than anyone would ever want to imagine. I worried that by giving it so much importance, we were preparing the way for another gunman in search of his day of ... infamy?

How do you respond?  With sorrow and compassion for families that have lost their loved ones just when they were the most lovable?  With grief for the lost potential of so many bright, happy lives?  With anger?  With bewilderment?  My husband asked me why Americans, who proclaim their religious feelings so loudly, feel it necessary to be prepared to kill dozens if not hundreds of human beings in just a few minutes with an arsenal of automatic weapons.  He thought Christ said to turn the other cheek.  

Then I saw Nicholas Kristof's column.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-do-we-have-the-courage-to-stop-this.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

As he points out: "The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000.
We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?
On Facebook Nicholas directed readers to Anne Curry's page.  She suggests that in memory of the victims people commit 26 acts of kindness. This spoke to me immediately because it's something I can do and it's something positive and loving in response to a meaningless act of hate.  I can do it now, today, and I don't have to wait for an act of Congress.  And perhaps, somewhere there is a child, a young person who is suffering and will be helped by one of those acts of kindness, helped to grow into a healthy, sane adult.  
For behind this tragedy is another, the tragedy of a lost child that didn't get the help he needed, a child who learned to respond to hate and suffering with more hate and more suffering in an unending spiral of insane violence.  And I remembered Elvis' wonderful song, "In the Ghetto."  
"People, don't you understand?  A child needs a helping hand.  Or he's gonna be an angry young man."
So I hope you who are reading this will respond to the tragedy of Newton with your own 26 acts of kindness.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Ne prends pas la mouche.*

Graham Greene once said that France is the only country in the world where waiters and prostitutes don't hesitate to correct your grammar.

I have just finished reading John Baxter's "A Pound of Paper".  He says, "One of the first things I'd learned about the French is that they correct your grammar.  It's a national tic, like the way the Japanese bow.  They even joke about it themselves.  In Jean Renoir's movie, The Vanishing Corporal, Jean-Pierre Cassel is being helped to get out of a German prison camp by the local dentist's daughter.  Even as she outlines his escape route, he corrects her French."

In a footnote he adds:
"There is also the joke about the English tourist in the French café.

Tourist: Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."
Waiter: M'sieu?
Tourist: In my soup.  A fly.  Un mouche.
Waiter: Une mouche, m'sieu. It's feminine.
Tourist (peering) : Blimey, you've got good eyesight.

*Ne prends pas la mouche = Literally, don't take the fly.  It's an idiom which means "Don't get upset, don't be offended."

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Reading with TPRS


How to read with students

Research, intuition and experience agree that students who read extensively in their second language acquire more vocabulary and better grammatical skills than students who don’t read.

The problem is getting them to read.  Many teachers assign reading as homework and expect their students to come to class prepared to discuss the text that they read at home.  Students who can not answer questions about the passage have obviously not done their homework.  So the class discussion is limited to those few who actually read and understood the assigned passage.  In the world of TPRS they are called 4%ers, the estimated percentage of American high school students who begin the study of a foreign language and carry through for four years.

Yet it is apparent that for many students the assigned passage was mission impossible.  They have neither the skills nor the confidence needed to wade their way through what appears to be a totally incomprehensible text.  Yes, there are strategies that can help them guess at the meaning of words, but the strategies depend on the existence of meaningful context.  The experts say that for students to read with pleasure and understanding, they must recognize at least nine out of ten words.  And discouraged students often fail to recognize even familiar words through lack of contextual clues.

Reading is an important element in the TPRS method.  The “R” of TPRS stands for Reading and it is the third and final step of the three steps that Blaine Ray defined as TPRS. Reading texts that are at an appropriate level furnishes the comprehensible input which is essential to acquiring the language. 

So how do we read with TPRS? First the teacher must choose a text with care so that the unknown vocabulary is limited.  She can use a class story that she has typed up, or a variant from another class or her own version.  It’s also possible to start with the text and backward plan the first two steps of TPRS to prepare the students to read it. It may require two or three sessions of PQA and Story if the passage contains a lot of new vocabulary. Low frequency vocabulary that is not essential to comprehension can be eliminated or replaced with more common words.

If the passage still seems daunting to students, the teacher may decide to make an embedded reading out of it.  She writes up a very brief summary of the main points as the first version, then adds details to obtain a second version and more details for a third version.

We read with the students, translating the text orally. Since Reading is the final step, the students have been hearing the new structures repeatedly since they were first presented and then circled throughout the PQA and Story step. The new structures should look familiar by now and we can ask the class to do a choral translation.  Or let individual students propose their translation.  Whenever there is a tricky word the teacher supplies it as soon as she sees her students hesitate.  She may or may not decide to circle the problem structure depending on how useful she feels it is.

I used to believe that I should be circling the target structures during the reading, although this felt rather laborious, having circled them so often in the preceding steps.  I now know that there are more interesting ways of getting in those added repetitions.  Also, this required constant switching between languages.  Personally, if we are going to translate, I prefer to save the questions in L2 for later.

Blaine Ray suggests working on a parallel story by comparing a student to a character in the story.  This can be effective, but it depends on the character’s situation which often is not comparable to a student’s.  Or at least we hope not. 

Jody, on Ben Slavic’s Professional Learning Community, recently shared her method of further exploiting the reading.  After they have translated a paragraph or more, she has a student sit at the front of the class, pretending to be a character in the story and the other students interview him.  He is free to answer as he pleases, so it becomes a kind of parallel story, but the student controls where he wants to go with it. Jody stops it whenever she feels that it’s appropriate, giving a good hand of applause to the student/character, and they either translate another paragraph or she calls on another student to play a different character. I think this is an excellent activity and will definitely be using it in the future.

Susie Gross explains that she often read novels with her students “lickety-split”.  That is, as the end of the school year approached, she would read an entire novel with her students.  It would be a TPRS novel with limited vocabulary and level appropriate.  She did no additional activities and she did not ask questions to test their comprehension.  She did nothing to pre-teach new vocabulary.  They simply translated the entire novel, decoding it paragraph by paragraph for the pleasure of the story.  Susie anticipated when they would not know a word and furnished it without letting the suspense build up. In less than two weeks the students would have read an entire novel and felt very proud of themselves.  They enjoyed reading “lickety-split” so much that one boy told her he didn’t like to read in English, but he loved reading in French.

A follow-up activity to a reading is the dictée.  I’m talking about the classical French dictée.  The teacher reads the text three times as the students write it down.  Ben Slavic explains this in detail on his site.  It’s a very good way to fix those structures in the students’ minds once and for all.

So there are several approaches to Reading in TPRS and the teacher can choose the one that suits her and her class best.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Retelling the story

In a TPRS class the teacher can ask one of the students to retell the story.

Generally we do this after we have asked the story and the students have been hearing the targeted structures repeated over and over again.  We never ask students to retell the story unless we are sure that they are ready.  This is in line with the principle that you should not ask a student to do something unless you are sure that he will succeed in the task.

Retelling the story allows students to hear it one more time, giving them more comprehensible input and giving the big picture after having circled all the details.  Often the teacher herself retells the story.  She can pretend to have forgotten parts of the story, so the students fill in whenever she stops and looks puzzled.  Or she can deliberately make mistakes that the students correct.

Asking students to retell the story allows the teacher to listen to their emergeant language and see which structures students are using easily, that is which have been acquired.  Structures that don't appear in the retelling or which students struggle with will need more repetition.  

Retelling is production, but it is sheltered production, since the student is asked to use language that he has heard repeated many times.  It should give the student confidence in his ability to use the language and should never be a cause of stress.

There are several ways of retelling the story.  If you have a few good, solid superstars, you can invite one of them to retell the story.  Or let two of them tell the story as a team.

I have asked students to do a chain retell.* One student gives the first sentence of the retell, the next student repeats the first sentence and adds one.  The third student repeats the first two sentences and adds one, and so on until the last student gives the complete summary of the story. This type of retell gives a maximum number of repetions.  When the teacher smiles and encourages the students, they become braver and they can also help each other out when someone falters. It should be a group effort.

Some classes found retelling difficult to organize.  I would then ask all the students to stand up and ask each student to say one sentence about the story, anything at all that they remembered, without worrying about where it might come in the order of events.  I would call a student and he would propose his sentence.  (If the grammar was not correct, I would echo the sentence back, as if I was repeating what he had said, but in a correct form.)  I would then listen to the next student and decide which sentence came first in the events of the story and ask the two students to stand in that order and repeat their sentences.  After hearing the third student, we would decide where he should stand.  When all the students had proposed a sentence, they were basically standing in the right order for a retell and I would ask them to repeat their sentences in order. If we didn't agree about the order, we had to ask students to repeat their sentences again to decide who should come first. I found that this method worked well with the weaker classes where students lacked the confidence to attempt a retell on their own. In this manner the students had only to say their own sentence, but listening to the others they heard the necessary repetitions.

Retelling the story is also excellent preparation for reading the story.

* (Originally the chain retell was a getting-to-know-each-other game I used on the first day of school.  When I had fewer than fifteen students I had them sit in a circle and I sat in the circle with them.  Then I would ask the student next to me his name, where he was from, his favorite sport or activity, if he had a pet.  Once I had the information I wanted, I asked the next student to tell us about the first and to introduce himself.  The third student told about the first two and introduced himself.  As we went around the circle, each student had to present all the others and himself, until we reached the last student who had to tell about everyone in the group.  Of course the last person in the group was me, and the students would listen very attentively to see if I actually remembered their name.)

Friday, November 23, 2012

The research is there.

TPRS evolved because Blaine Ray considered Stephen Krashen's research into how a second language is acquired fundamental.  Today, in certain circles, it's fashionable to pooh-pooh Krashen and his Comprehensible Input hypothesis.   At the TESOL conference in Paris I heard one of the main speakers refer to it as the "talk until you drop" method.  

First of all, I have read Krashen's five hypotheses and they correspond with my own personal experience as a language learner and as a language teacher for more than fifty years.  They match what I have observed and what I have experienced.  I have seen no research or arguments that can counter that.  If you are not familiar with Krashen's work, there is an excellent summary at  http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

On the other hand, there is research to back up Krashen.  There are his own findings, but also that of others.  One of these studies that I read recently explains how the subconscious is able to grasp and apply grammatical rules that have not been explained to the students.  http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/unconscious-language-learning/ 

This is the goal of TPRS : To present the language so that the subconscious soaks up the structure and spontaneously reproduces correct language.  Students in a school system have only a few hundred hours to learn a foreign language.  We needed thousands of hours of immersion to learn to speak our native language.  It seems logical that class hours should be devoted almost exclusively to concentrated comprehensible input, that any time given to talking about grammar in the native language is wasting our limited time.  However fascinating the intricacies of grammar may be, we can not expect young learners to share our fascination.  Most young students are excited about learning to communicate in another language.  Their excitement and motivation soon die away when confronted with lectures on whether or not the genitive form can be used with inanimate subjects.  (Which is a question that not all native speakers agree on.)

I'm constantly trying to find metaphors to explain to students, and their parents, the difference between acquiring a language and learning a language.  Acquiring targets the subconscious whereas learning a language targets the conscious mind.  I recently used the metaphor of passing a driving test.  My daughter-in-law, a very intelligent, hard-working person who was highly motivated, failed her first driving test.  She had done nothing very wrong, but the examiner felt that she wasn't ready to drive on her own.  She retook the test a few weeks later and passed it.  My explanation is that the first time her conscious mind was in control and she was thinking through every action.  The examiner saw that she had not yet acquired the automatic reactions that a good driver must have.  The second time she was more relaxed because she had decided that if she failed, she would keep trying until she passed it, and she let her subconscious guide her.  The examiner saw that she had the spontaneous reflexes she needed.

Stephen Krashen calls the conscious mind that intervenes to tell us how to speak the language our "monitor".  The monitor is an editor.  It's very effective when we have produced a written text to go over it and correct the mistakes we perceive.  It becomes disastrous when we let the monitor take over our spoken language.  We hesitate, we repeat ourselves, we stumble, and we get very little out.  This happens because we are thinking more about the form than the content.  When students concentrate on content and forget form, their language will be as correct as possible, given the input they have received.  I've often noticed during oral exams, that a student will say something correctly, stop, think about a grammar rule, and then say it differently and incorrectly.  Here the monitor is intervening, hindering correct expression, like a backseat driver who hasn't seen the signs saying no left turn.

"Talk until you drop"?  There are teachers doing this.  In France teachers are instructed to use the target language exclusively.  There's no question that most English language teachers in France speak excellent English and can furnish a good model for their students.  They give input, yet their students do not seem to acquire the language.  Why?  Because they are not trained to make their input comprehensible.  I once asked a colleague with a lovely British accent to talk to one of my classes about a subject in which she was far more knowledgeable than I was.  She spoke so quickly that even I had difficulty understanding her at times and used her expert's vocabulary.  The students soon stopped making any effort to understand her.  She was not giving them comprehensible input.

I later asked another person to speak to the class on the same subject.  His English was only slightly better than theirs.  He spoke slowly and used his own limited vocabulary.  The students were hanging on every word because they were understanding him.  He was not as good a model as she could have been, but his input was comprehensible.  Teachers who talk until they drop without furnishing comprehensible input can not produce fluent speakers.  Their example should not be used to refute Krashen's theories.

Many of these teachers will tell you that their students can not follow their grammatical explanations, so that part of the lesson has to be in French.  TPRS finds that lengthy grammatical explanations are irrelevant.  Grammar is pointed out in "pop-up" questions that take only a few seconds.  It's important to note the reversal in the order.  Traditional grammar explains a rule, furnishes examples and then drills the mechanism.  In TPRS classes students hear the structure many times, and when it has been acquired, the teacher points out how it affects meaning. Because the students have already acquired the structure, it only takes a few seconds to highlight the mechanism.  So we have traditional teachers speaking in the TL for most of the lesson, but switching to the native language whenever it's important to be understood.  Doesn't that give the message to students that trying to understand is a wasted effort because anything that's really important will be in their native language?

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Hello again!

Today I went to the home of two boys that I taught in primary school two years ago.

Their mother wanted me to help them because now they are in middle school and they are having difficulties.  I sat and talked to them in English for half an hour.  I asked them if they had bicycles and we talked about their bicycles, their dog and their cats.  We talked about what they like to do, how they go to school, what they want for Christmas.  We had a real conversation.  All in English.  I was delighted to see that they had retained quite a bit of what I had taught them.  They were both using "so-so", an expression I taught and which is not in the middle school textbooks.  

I asked to see their notebooks to see where the problem was.  I saw a page where next to an example in English there was an explanation of the genitive form.  The explanation was in French.  Do you think a thirteen year old boy knows what genitive means?  Do you think the average native English speaker knows what genitive means?  Do you think that a well-educated French person who has not studied English or Latin in the university knows what "génitif" means?  

I can help these boys learn to speak English better.  We can continue to chat in English and their English will improve.  But I explained to the parents that I will not spend time helping them to do pointless exercises that are a waste of valuable class time.  Does being able to recite a rule of English grammar in French make anyone a better English speaker?

It takes thousands of hours to become a fluent speaker of a foreign language.  Students have only a few hundred hours in class.  So shouldn't we be putting that precious time to the best possible use, speaking the language, rather than talking about the language in their mother tongue?

Monday, November 19, 2012

Report on TESOL France

The conference began Friday afternoon and lasted until Sunday afternoon.  I really didn’t know what to expect in the crowd at this national conference (350 people attended). I thought I’d probably be seeing a lot of British people. And I did, but there were also a lot more Americans than I thought I’d see, as a matter of fact the President and Vice-President of TESOL France are Americans and there were several other “speakers” who were American like me. The first big surprise was that though this is TESOL France, people were coming from all over the world to attend. There were quite a few people from Eastern Europe, Ukrania, Slovakia, Macedonia, Roumainia and Russia, and there were people from Saudi Arabia, etc. I guess if you want to go to a TESOL conference, why not pick one in Paris? The three “plenary” speakers were Brazilian, Canadian and Chinese.

Most of the people present seemed to work in private language schools or at the university level. There were very few native French who taught in the French education system. I quickly realized that I wouldn’t have to convince my audience that “grammar instruction” is not the only way to go.
I discovered something called Dogme, which has nothing to do with dogma, but with a Danish film movement which was about using no artificial lighting but filming the action as it happened, if I got that right. It was interesting and I went to two talks about it. The idea is that the teacher gets her students talking and then focuses on something they say which becomes the backbone of her lesson. That is, (this is my personal interpretation) she identifies their needs by listening to their “emergeant language” and builds her lesson around a perceived need. I think we do this in TPRS all the time without asking our students to “chat” at the beginning of every lesson. But a lot of things that were said in these two talks fitted in very well with CI and TPRS. I can see how the idea of asking students to start a conversation, which would mean starting the lesson with output, would be quite difficult to justify in 1st or 2nd year, but later it might be interesting to try. And I heard favorable references to Krashen and Comprehensible Input by more than one speaker.
I also heard a speaker put down Krashen by saying he supported “the teacher talks until he drops” method and claiming that students who were taught that way never became speakers of the language. I think that his portrait was pretty much based on the kind of teachers who talk in the TL all the time without worrying about making their Input comprehensible to their students. I’ve often seen this in France where teachers are supposed to use TL all the time, and students sit through years of English classes and come out with a beginner’s level because they didn’t understand what was being said. When I did my own presentation I took care to insist on the fact that Krashen says that the Input should be both comprehensible and compelling and that TPRS was a way of doing that.
Two other interesting ideas that I picked up were “a journal dialogue” and “minisagas”. A journal dialogue is basically fluency writing where the teacher responds to what the student has written, not by correcting it but by responding to the student’s content. The teacher did this in only one class, because it was time-consuming, but had journals to show how far the students had progressed. In retrospect, I wonder how much time teachers spend "correcting" student's written production with red pens.  I doubt that responding to content rather than grammatical correction would take up as much time.  
Mini-sagas involve asking students to write a story with beginning, middle and end in only 50 words. And exactly 50 words. The idea is that they have to manipulate the language, look for synonyms, learn to make their language more effective and more precise to make it fit into the limits of a mini-saga. Again, I saw this as something that would be interesting with upper-level students.
What about my talk? It was on Sunday morning. That gave me time to “network” on Friday and Saturday.  When people saw TPRS on my badge, I had a chance to try to explain what TPRS is without boring them, kind of practicing for my talk. Sunday morning 10 o’clock was probably not the best slot, since many people living in the Parisian area only came for the Saturday activities and I heard people from out of France saying they were going to see the Eiffel Tower, and others overslept, but I had about 20 people present. There were six or seven other talks going on at the same time, so that was a fairly good turnout for something that people had never heard of before. I had 30 handouts and gave them all out because some people who had not been able to attend asked me for my handout.
I had been working hard to make my talk fit into the limits of one hour, but people tended to dribble in, so I wasn’t able to start on time. I wanted to give at least a brief demonstration of TPRS using a language people didn’t already know, and had asked a woman from Ukrania to be my teacher. She didn’t show up until the end when she apologized because she had been caught in a rainstorm on the way and had to go back to her hotel and change her clothes. But there was a woman from Croatia in the front row who graciously accepted to teach us Croatian. I gave people jobs, chose a barometer (a man from Saudi Arabia who looked rather skeptical) asked someone to tally how many times I said Comprehensible Input and tried to give them the necessary background in how the method had evolved and why I considered it a revolution, how I had first heard about it, and what it involved. Then we very quickly did the lesson in Croatian, using “has” as our structure, writing it on the board and going to “Kellie ima Rolls Royce.” We then asked people who has a Rolls Royce, What does Kellie have, we asked the man from Saudi Arabia if he had a Rolls Royce and he told us he had a Caprice (?). It could have gone on much longer, and I will definitely try this again, because the participants were really enjoying it. I explained why I chose Rolls Royce and how we use universally known brand names to adapt to beginners’ limited vocabulary.
A man sitting in the front row was nodding enthusiastically throughout the talk, but commented that he didn’t accept the Learning/Acquiring distinction and feels that learning is more important than Krashen says. I had been expecting something like this and replied that to me, having taught English to French speakers for 55 years, Krashen’s hypothesis clicks with my personal experience. And I pointed out that he was a 4%er as most language teachers are, and I proposed my own personal explanation that 4%ers are able to learn with little Comprehensible Input because we go over lessons and replay things in our heads, compensating for the lack of CI. (I know I did this all the time when I was learning French.)
Only two people had ever heard of TPRS before. One was Marie-Pierre Journaud, who is on the moretprs list and was the person who advised me to apply to the TESOL conference. She teaches native French who want to become English teachers. Since they are all 4%ers, she says that they don’t understand the importance of TPRS because they don’t realize there’s a problem. They are still assuming that their future students will be able to learn the way they did.
The other was an American university teacher who says that she had read about TPRS in a course that reviewed different methods but had never seen it practiced. I’m pretty sure that she’s going to be looking it up when she goes back to the States.
A woman came up to me as soon as my talk was over and was very enthusiastic, saying she was definitely going to try it out. She does private tutoring and said it was just the thing for one of her older beginners who kept saying, “But I don’t understand! It’s all Chinese to me.”
I had to cut off the end, because the next speaker was urgently wanting to take over the room and the participants had to rush to get to the other talks. I really regret that there was no opportunity to chat with people who were present and answer some of their questions. But at least there are 20 people who had never heard of TPRS before and are now curious.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

TESOL FRANCE - Here I come!

I leave tomorrow morning for Paris on the TGV.  I'm going to present TPRS at the annual TESOL Conference in France.  Tesol means Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

I've decided not to try to do a Power point.  It would probably bug anyway.  I only have an hour, and I doubt that anyone has ever made the momentous decision of entirely changing the way they teach after an hour long talk. All I can do in an hour is spark their curiosity and point them towards online sites that can help them understand what TPRS is all about.

So I'm simply going to talk to the people who come to listen to me.  There are six or seven speakers at the same time, so the competition is going to be stiff.  I'm going to tell them a bit about me and my journey on the TPRS road.  I thought I would assign tasks, as I would in a TPRS class.  Ask someone to sketch scenes from my story, ask someone to count the number of times I say comprehensible input, assign barometers who are to signal when they don't understand.

And then I have this daring idea.  I wanted to demonstrate with my son Daniel.  He teaches Breton and I thought I could coach him through a lesson.  But he can't make it, and everyone present speaks English and French, the only languages I speak fluently.  I know, Carol Gaab learned enough Hebrew from her telephone answering machine to give her first workshop in Hebrew, but I'm not Carol Gaab.  So I'm going to look for someone in the audience who speaks a little known language, maybe even Breton, and coach them through some PQA with "He has".  I told Ben Slavic about my idea and he was too kind to say he thought I was crazy, but he did suggest that I just do it in English.

The problem is that everyone in the room will be an English teacher.  So I'm going to try.  

I've prepared a handout with TPRS sites and also some information about some of the people who practice TPRS in Europe.  There are more than I thought.


Sites to visit:
Blaine Ray – The founder of the movement is still active, giving workshops and mentoring.  He can always be picked out in a crowd.  He’s the guy in a shirt with palm trees and bright blue parrots. http://www.blaineraytprs.com/ 

Stephen Krashen His work on Comprehensible Input is the solid foundation on which TPRS is built. www.sdkrashen.com

Susie Gross was one of the first to understand the importance of Blaine Ray’s techniques. Her “influence on the current massive change in foreign language education in the US cannot be overstated.” http://susangrosstprs.com/

Daily Kos - For an unbiased review of “the Green Bible.”  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/18/1066137/-Book-Review-Fluency-through-TPR-Storytelling

Laurie Clarq – An experienced teacher, workshop presenter and frequent participant in moretprs discussions, Laurie is always able to embrace two sides of an argument by seeing the hearts behind the words. She helped develop the recent innovation in reading called “Embedded Reading” which is explained on her site. http://blog.heartsforteaching.com/

Ben Slavic – My guru – Ben has a way of saying things that resonates with me.  His book TPRS in a Year helped me to see how all the pieces fitted together. His web site has free resources and videos of him in class. For the price of a monthly cup of coffee, it’s possible to participate in his Professional Learning Community.  The books can be downloaded.  http://www.benslavic.com/

The American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages has taken the position that 90% of classroom speech should be in the target language and suggests that TPRS is an effective way to achieve this goal. *http://www.actfl.org/publications/the-language-educator/sample-articles

Karen Rowan manages Fluency Fast, TPRS courses for adults and helps edit The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, which often carries articles by Stephen Krashen and other big names in the TPRS world.  You can find her at www.TPRStories.com or www.fluencyfast.com . You can subscribe to the free online version of IJFLT at www.tprstories.com/ijflt .

Carol Gaab is a spectacular demonstrator when she’s not publishing material for teachers, writing readers for students or traveling to workshops around the world.  www.tprstorytelling.com

Jason Fritz is another early member of the TPRS adventure.  He has taken the Reading in TPRS and made it something exciting which he calls Reading Theater. www.comprehensibleinput.com .  He founded the International Forum on Language Teaching which is at www.iflt.org

Teri Wiechart is one of a group of TPRS teachers who have worked to improve coaching at conferences and in the classroom. You can contact her  to learn more about coaching at profdev@ofla-online.org or twiechart@hotmail.com .

Moretprs This is a yahoo group forum which began early in the millennium with a handful of teachers who were trying TPRS and wanted to exchange ideas.  There are now over 6000 followers and daily digests. Blaine Ray, Susie Gross, Karen Rowan, Stephen Krashen and many other well known names participate regularly in the discussions. Beginners often describe their difficulties and ask for advice. Here is where information is posted concerning workshops and National TPRS Conference.  Go to www.yahoogroups.com and register to follow the discussions. 

TPRS IN EUROPE
Great Britain  
Keith Rogers – a Latin and Ancient Greek teacher at Rochester Grammar School who uses TPRS and recently organised the first TPRS workshops (given by Blaine Ray) in the UK (see  http://www.smore.com/rk54)  which attracted 24 delegates. Keith has spoken on the principles of TPRS at various gatherings of Classical teachers (ROSA cluster group, Association of Latin Teachers Summer School, Joint Association of Classical Teachers INSET day, local feeder schools gathering, to student teachers on the King’s College teacher training course and at Septimana Latina  (in Latin!)).  He will be giving future talks to the Guildford Association of Classical Teachers and running an introduction to TPRS workshop at the Association of Latin Teachers summer school in 2013.
 
The Netherlands – Alike Last teaches French and does TPRS workshops for teachers.

Kirstin Plante and Iris Maas are both Spanish teachers, and the founders of TPRS Nederland, a teacher training company for TPRS. Kirstin owns a language institute near Amsterdam and teaches uniquely with TPRS. Iris works at a Hotel Management School and uses TPRS wherever and whenever she can. Together they give numerous workshops throughout the Netherlands and Europe, and they run a European webshop for TPRS materials.

General website: www.tprsnederland.com (Dutch)
Shop: www.tprswebshop.com (people in France can order here as well)
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TPRSNederland (English and Dutch)
twitter: Kirstin Plante (English and Dutch)

Spain  - Ignacio Almandoz gives private lessons in English and in Spanish. He says, “After 4 years, I'm still excited about teaching with TPRS and learning through CI.  (I'm currently learning Russian, German, Portuguese and Italian) without studying the grammar or doing exercises in the traditional way. So I'm trying all these techniques and possibilities on myself. It helps me understand much better the teaching and learning process. My own students are making me a better teacher day after day.”  You can contact Ignacio by Skype at blueaspen or by e-mail at lamparamaravillosa@gmail.com.

Germany – Martin Anders teaches at Kaltenkirchen Waldorf School and has been using TPRS for four years.  His site is at 
http://tprs-for-germany.com/blog/?page_id=12 
He says, “I am absolutely convinced that TPRS will be able to improve our teachingmethods, add interest and fun to our lessons and to improve language acquisition which – up to now – is quite mediocre.”  
 
France Judith Logsdon-Dubois, professeur agrégé. I taught in a French lycée from 1995 to 2012.  Before that I taught English in French-speaking Cameroon.  I first heard of TPRS in 2006; I began using it the following year.  Once I saw how effective it was, I could never go back.  Today I give private lessons and train teachers. I have a poorly organized blog called Mrs. D's Funny Little Classroom -  http://funnylittleclassroom.blogspot.fr  To contact me:  judyldubois@aol.com .