Saturday, July 7, 2012

Reading a film VII or "Going with the Flow"


I’ve gone through, step by step, some of the things that I do when I use a film as my textbook.  The first essential step, of course, is choosing a film that will draw in the students and keep them interested, a film that has content that they will want to discuss.  Because the teacher must always remember that what we are doing is discussing an interesting film.  

That means that talking about the film takes precedence over any lesson plans.  If the students are interested and engaged, the teacher should go with the flow and not worry about being side-tracked.  Such moments when the students are using the language to communicate their feelings and opinions are the gold that we pan for all year long.

Ben Slavic recently posted an eloquent plea for going with the flow on his blog and on the moretprs forum. He said:

“In The Power of Reading, Insights From The Research, Stephen Krashen mentions the importance of flow in reading (p. 29). Why shouldn't this same concept be a key part of our focus as we learn to get better and better at delivering listening input to our students in the form of PQA and stories?

“Water runs down mountains and not up them. In the same way, simplicity and flow must reign in any part of a TPRS/CI class. The water must flow downhill in a natural way. Things must emerge naturally. Language must emerge naturally. The student must be unaware that she is learning.

“For that to happen, I must be relaxed. I must not try to control the story too much. I must not get nervous about the process. This requires trust in the questioning process.

“What is trust? It is believing that what we do works. We must learn to pause and go slowly and then that lets things emerge organically. We learn to let our questions produce new information that, because it is remarkable and about the people in the room, isn't ignored, but drives things forward.

“This brings full participation by the students in the class, who are thrilled that their cute suggestions infuse the class with interest. The script becomes what it is supposed to be, the banks of the river and not the water in the river as the water that is comprehensible input goes down the mountain effortlessly.

“Letting the water flow downhill. Teachers try to push the water uphill in their grammar classes. It is the same way in classes that use computer technology. Trying to push water uphill is not just boring, it is impossible, no matter how many Rosetta Stone bells and whistles are used - the student rejects it because the lesson is not comprehensible and not about her.

“Water flows downhill. Each time we say something in the TL and a student understands what we say, it is like adding a drop of water down the side of the mountain. Those drops, when joined together, begin imperceptibly to form rivulets and eventually rivers. The kids begin to understand large chunks of what we say because of so much input.

“After thousands and thousands of hours of comprehensible input in the form of listening and reading, after thousands of little rivulets have been formed, rivers of knowledge form and the language thus built in the mind of the student reaches the sea of fluency. The process is effortless and astonishing.

“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it this way:

...’if you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea....’”

Friday, July 6, 2012

Reading a film VI


In TPRS the teachers prefer surprise tests, in order to measure what has been acquired and not what the student has memorized the night before.  But I teach in France where students, not to mention my colleagues and the administration, would not take me seriously if I did not give tests in the traditional manner.  When I began using TPRS, I saw my students’ grades improve and realized that my class average was going to be high and would make me look like an “easy” teacher.  (In France every trimester has its conseil de classe where all the teachers of a class meet with representatives of the administration and parents and students in order to discuss the report card of each student in the class.)

At that time we had a deputy head that I had a lot of respect for.  I went to him and explained that I was using a new method and the effect it was having on my grades.  He smiled and shook his head.  He said there were enough teachers giving low marks that he didn’t think it would hurt if mine were a little high.

I do give surprise quizzes.  And I also give what I call an “Oral Interrogation” which effectively cushions any very low marks that a student might get on the formal written test.  An Oral Interrogation is actually a way of reviewing for the test, but students get a grade on it that counts half as much as the written test.  

The class before an Oral Interrogation I ask students to prepare five questions about the scene we have studied.  If I think there’s a danger of everybody coming up with the same five questions, I may tell some students to prepare questions about one character, others about another, or to prepare questions about what happened before, etc.  With good classes I give them their Oral Interrogation paper to fill in at home and bring to class with them.  With weak classes, I give them time to fill in the worksheets at the beginning of the class, so I can go around, helping them with their questions.

Their papers have these instructions:
Tick each of your participations:
I asked a question.
I answered a question.
I corrected a statement.
I expressed my opinion.
I repeated a question or a statement.


Then the students ask their questions.  If there is a grammatical problem, I ask if someone can help reformulate the question, or ask if they mean to say …   and give the correct structure.  Sometimes I don’t understand what they want to say, and we work that out.  The students correct their questions on the worksheet.  I always ask someone to repeat the correct question before asking someone to answer it.  This ensures that everyone has heard the question and gives everyone time to think about the answer.  If the answer is acceptable, I ask someone to repeat it.  The repetitions allow quiet, attentive students to have a decent grade.  If there’s more than one possible answer, we discuss this.  Basically we’re discussing the scene we’ve studied, but in a rather formal way.  

During the process one student is secretary and marks who participates.  If I see that some students are not participating, I ask the secretary who has not yet spoken, and ask that person for a question.  Or I may let the secretary choose, when there are a lot of hands raised.  Or I may ask the person who answered a question to choose who will ask the next question.

When there are about five minutes of class time left, I ask the students to complete the bottom of the worksheet.

Did you listen attentively all of the time?  _________________________________
What did you think about this lesson? __________________________________________________________________________

My Grades:     Participation grade: (0-5)
            Attentiveness grade: (0-5)

I collect the papers and let the students go.  Grading their worksheets is very quick.  One point for each grammatically correct question.  One point for each interesting question.  If they have been honest in their grades for participation and attentiveness, I accept their grades.  If I don’t agree, I give my own.  I generally divide the grade by two to put it over ten, since in France a written test is usually over twenty.  (Twenty by French standards is 100%) 

Oral Interrogations are not TPRS, and I did them long before I heard of TPRS, but I find that they give us an opportunity to talk about the scene one more time, and I’m able to get in many more repetitions of the structures I’ve targeted in the scene.  So I have integrated them into my use of TPRS.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Penpals

I organized penpal exchanges for my students for many years.  First I found an American colleague who taught French so that our students could exchange letters.  I asked my students to write a letter presenting themselves in French.  It's very important that the correspondents write in their native language.  Forcing them to write in their L2 is like pulling teeth and does not improve their writing ability at all.  When they receive a letter written in their target language they're motivated to read it.  They learn lots of expressions used by other teenagers and they quickly adopt them. 

When my students' letters arrived, the American teacher tried to match them with students who had similar interests.  Then we made up a master list to see who was writing to who.  It would take ten days, sometimes more for the letters to get back to me.  You can't imagine how excited the students were when I arrived with a bundle of letters.  Even the ones who had dragged their feet about writing were excited to get a reply.  I usually had to give the entire hour over to helping them read their letters and preparing answers.  I always had to explain what "hanging out,"  Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior meant.  Homecoming and Prom were other things that French teenagers know nothing about.  Krashen says that reading is what helps most to learn a language if there is compelling input.  Letters from an American teenager were highly compelling input.

I tried to send a batch of letters every month.  That meant collecting them, checking who had not written, and mailing them.  I got the school to pay the postage.  Students often wanted to add pictures, cds and other small objects to their letters.  I had to be careful that this didn't get out of hand because it added to the weight, thus to the postage.

Why not use the internet?  I told my students that they were free to exchange e-mail addresses and communicate that way as often as they liked.  Aren't I nice?  But I also wanted a written letter for the class.  It would have been hard for me to control what was going on by internet, so I didn't even try.  On the other hand, I could look over their letters and be sure there was nothing inappropriate in them.

Once they had exchanged a couple batches of letters, we worked on creating a mini-film to send to our correspondents.  The students introduced themselves to the camera and filmed our school and the town center.  They enjoyed working on the project and everyone participated.  It was output, but it was Real, not an activity invented just to get them to say something.  We usually did the introductions in English and the explanations for tourists either in French or in both languages.  We sent our CD to the States and received one from the American school that the students watched with great interest.

For many students this exchange was their first and only occasion to use English to communicate with real people.  They enjoyed it immensely.


Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Reading a film V


By this time my students and I have reached the first big, pivotal scene in the film.  Kevin wants to go to the River Festival to see the fireworks, but his mother doesn’t like crowds and won’t let him go alone.  So he offers to pay Max to go with him, so his mother feels he has a bodyguard.

It’s a long scene with more action than dialog, but it is crucial to the rest of the film because it shows how Max and Kevin are able to combine Max’s physical strength with Kevin’s intelligence to escape the Doghouse Boys. We can watch it the first time with little need to translate.  The three structures that I want them to acquire are “trust me” and “I’m proud of you” and “tells him to..”.  We can get some interesting PQA with “Who do you trust?” and “Who is proud of you?”  But “to tell someone to do something” is difficult for French students.  The scene gives lots of opportunities to circle it.  Where did Kevin tell Max to go?  What did Kevin tell Max to do?  Who told Max to go straight?  Why did Kevin tell Max to go into the pond?

I then give the students a written summary of the scene, which we read together and I can circle the three expressions again.  I want them to read the summary several times, so I give them a crossword puzzle using the new vocabulary as homework.  They think I want them to learn the vocabulary, but what happens is that they reread the text many times looking for the vocabulary.  They do learn the vocabulary but they acquire the structures.  After this scene they have little trouble with “tell him to..”

Tomorrow I will explain how I prepare my students for a test on the scene. …

Monday, July 2, 2012

Reading a film IV


As the scenario develops I continue « reading » the film with my students, translating the subtitles into French, discussing the situation and the characters, doing PQA wherever it seems appropriate.

PQA?  Personalized Questions and Answers.  For example, very early in the film Max says that he looks like Godzilla.  My students assume that “like” is aimer, so they cannot understand the phrase.  “looks like” is a structure that they need to acquire.  Especially for this film, because Max is worried that he may be like his father.  So I ask a student if he has a brother or sister, and does he look like his brother.  This year I had twins so they quickly grasped the meaning, and I could ask other students if they looked like their mother or their father.  Or ask “Who do you look like?”  One girl explained that she looked like her father’s mother, etc.  This is PQA.  But it goes beyond relating the target vocabulary to the students, which I tried to do in a rather awkward way when I was first trying TPRS.  The heart of PQA is forgetting the target structure because you are learning interesting things about your students.  When they are focused on the content and not on the form, they are acquiring the language without thinking about it.   

When I asked a former student to put her impressions of the TPRS method in writing, she commented, “and best of all it made us connected to each other.” I think it was the PQA, making the students themselves the subject matter to be discussed in class, which gave the students the impression that they were creating bonds.  This may be particularly true in France where many classes are still in lecture mode, with little interaction between students and teachers.

PQA also helps to avoid getting into too much of a routine that some students call “play-pause”.  I play the film, pause to discuss what we’ve seen and play another bit.  This needs to be varied in order to keep their interest.  Some students who are used to having teachers use films for only recreational purposes moan and groan every time you hit the pause button.  I explain to them that we are not “watching” a film, we are studying it.  And I also use a little Fred Jones on them when they demand to be allowed to watch the film without stopping. 

Fred Jones? He wrote Tools for Teaching, which many American teachers consider the Bible of classroom management.  One of his suggestions is to use PAT, Preferred Activity Time, to negotiate the behavior you want from your students.  You allow them to earn PAT by following your rules.  I want them to be quiet and attentive while we are viewing a scene.  Sometimes they are tempted to make comments in French which disrupt the concentration of others.  So when they begin begging to watch without stopping, I challenge them to earn so many PAT points in order to have a session of all play and no pause.  I set a number of minutes, usually starting with ten, and tell them that every time they are quiet and attentive with no interruptions for ten minutes, they will earn one PAT point.  When they have a set number of points, which I decide according to the class profile, we will have session with no pauses.   

How do I decide?  I want them to succeed.  I want them to attain their goal.  So I decide on a number that seems relatively easy for them to achieve.  Once they have achieved it and have had their reward, I can announce that from now on they’ll need fifteen minutes of quiet concentration to earn a PAT point.

Now, the system will only work if it is easy for me.  I don’t want to be worried about keeping track of time while I’m trying to get some valuable PQA going.  So I choose a student to be time-keeper.  And I don’t choose the quiet, attentive student that never peeps.  I choose someone who’s pretty much a nice guy but a bit hyper-active and a bit of a class clown.  By making him time-keeper, I get him on my side.  He’s getting the attention he craves by being my assistant, not by working against me.  When we are ready to begin working on the film, I nod at him and he starts the timer on his cell-phone.  (Here in France, the fact that he’s allowed to use his cell-phone in class in this way also makes it kind of a cool thing to do.)  We begin talking about the film, but if at some point someone blurts something out in French, or gets off topic and starts talking about a rugby game, etc., I simply look at the time-keeper and say, “Zero.”  Which means to go back to Zero and start timing again.

The beauty of the system is that I don’t have to say anything cross to the troublemaker.  My time-keeper starts out by giving the culprit a dirty look, but the next time he’ll voice his displeasure.  I just shrug.  I’ve seen the whole class come down hard on a big, popular rugby player who was used to getting away with carrying on his own monologue throughout the class.  He was absolutely amazed to discover that it was his friends telling him to shut up in language that no teacher had ever used with him.  He hadn’t realized that they really wanted to earn those PAT points.  And I’m the cat that ate the cream because there they are, working hard at being attentive and concentrated so that I will ALLOW them to watch a film in English with English subtitles.

I usually manage to give them their PAT reward when we come to a point in the film where there’s a lot of action that needs little or no explanation.  I tell them that I won’t stop the film unless they ask me to.  Which sometimes happens when there’s dialog that needs to be translated.  So we’re doing exactly what I was doing before, except that for one session they are the ones who decide to hit the Pause button.     To be continued …..