Letters to Kelsey - 3

Kelsey:" I think I now comprehend the idea of circling, but I'm not sure how he is supposed to say what he has when he doesn't have the words for "horse" or "bike" yet.  Should he say it in French, then I write it on the "board"?  (I think I'm just going to have a piece of paper between us to act as the board) for him to refer to?  Or should I not make him talk at all?"

It's okay for him to say "cheval" which shows that he's understood your question. And yes, write it down with the translation.  Horse = cheval.  Then say it.  In TPRS classrooms very short, one or two word answers in the first language are allowed when students don’t have the vocabulary they need.  So they are not kept from participating and you can decide whether it’s a word you want to teach or not.  If you think it useful, you translate the word, put it on the board (or a piece of paper) and refer back to the written translation as often as needed.  This is called "Point and Pause."  You point at the word they need and pause to give time for processing.  What you don't want is a long complicated answer, often with a subordinate clause :-(, because you don't want to get side-tracked.  

And you'll find that there are a lot of English expressions that have been adopted into French.  We call them “transparent”.  (When I use the film "Shawshank Redemption", there's the word "turnout" which I always had a lot of difficulty in explaining to my students.  Then I went to a student's house and she asked where I had parked.  When I explained, she said, "Oh, vous vous êtes garé dans le turnout." She's from the north of France, and it seems that they call the turnout "un turnout". 

Remember, when you start in on your story, you can accept or refuse his suggestions.  It’s always your story.  So, unless he's very interested in horses, I'd prefer bike, because it's used more often.  Keep your vocabulary as high frequency as possible.  If he brings in a French word that you hadn't anticipated, think about how useful it will be before you decide whether or not to go with it.  

Lilou Wants a Cat

This story was created by two students in a private TPRS lesson.  The goal was to use has, wants, gives.

There is a girl.  Her name is Lilou.  She is tall and she has short blond hair.  She has a big pink dog, but she doesn’t have a cat.  She wants a cat.

She goes to Claire’s. Claire has two cats but her cats are big.  Lilou wants a little baby cat.  Claire  doesn’t give a cat to Lilou.  Lilou is sad.

She goes to Miriam’s.  Miriam has four little baby cats.  She has a black cat, but Lilou doesn’t want a black cat. She has a black and white cat, but Lilou doesn’t want a black and white cat.  She has a brown cat, but Lilou doesn’t want a brown cat.  She has a grey striped cat, but Lilou doesn’t want a grey striped cat. Miriam doesn’t give a cat to Lilou.  Lilou is sad.

Lilou goes to Bordeaux by bus.  She goes to a pet shop.  She sees a little orange cat.  She wants the little orange cat.  She gives 44 euros and 37 cents to the man in the pet shop.  He gives the little orange cat to Lilou.  The man has his money and Lilou has her cat.  Everybody is happy.

The End

Letters to Kelsey - 2

Kelsey wanted to know what circling was exactly, if I did it with adults and if it didn't get boring.

This is why at TPRS workshops they put you in the place of a student and teach you a language you don't know, so you can experience how it feels to be a student in a TPRS class.  I did Swedish at one workshop and Mandarin at another.  It may seem boring to you (the teacher) because you understand every word you are saying.  Your student, however, is struggling.  His ears aren't atuned to the language; he's decoding every word you say. When you see that he's no longer struggling, that he's answering your questions easily, that's when you move on in your story, before it has time to become boring.

Yes, I do this with adults in private lessons. With more advanced students I rarely circle, just when there's a particular structure that's giving them problems. Beginners need lots of circling. As Ben says, we never go SLOW enough.  He says we have to hang in there and go so slow it hurts.  You watch your students' eyes to see how well they're understanding. 

Circling :  Make a statement.  Make sure your student understands the statement.  "Jim likes big American cars."  

 Ask  a Yes/no question.           "Does Jim like big American cars?"

 Ask either or questions.           

 "Does Jim like big American cars or does Tom like big American cars?"

 "Does Jim like big American cars or does Jim detest (cognate) big American cars?"

 "Does Jim like big German cars or does Jim like big American cars?"

 "Does Jim like big American cars or little American cars?"

Each time the student answers with short, one word answers, you nod and repeat the original statement as you would in an ordinary conversation when you agree with the person.

         Ask a question with a negative answer.  

"Does Jim like little Japanese cars?"  

This is called Two for One, because you agree when the student says no, saying "No, Jim doesn't like little Japanese cars.  He likes big American cars."

         

Ask as many Wh- questions as possible.  "Who likes big American cars? What does Jim like?  What kind of car does Jim like?"  When your student has the information, or when he's been trained to use his imagination, you can ask Where? When? Why? How? How many?

Circling is milking one statement for as many repetitions as possible, so the student is understanding and hearing the structures over and over again.  With practice you'll be able to circle in your sleep, and your student will spontaneously use the correct structure that you have been repeating because through the constant repetition his subconscious mind has acquired it.  Even traditional teachers have found circling to be a valuable tool in their kit.  You can use it in the lycée with your students there.

Once you have circled one statement, you can add another to continue the story.  You circle the second statement and then go on to the third, etc.  You can see how it can take an hour to do one simple story.  From time to time you recapitulate the story, and when the student is comfortable with it, you can ask him to "retell" the story.  In the example I gave you it doesn't matter what the man's name is or what he likes or what kind of car he likes.  So those are elements you can get your student to volunteer, so it becomes his story. "Jim" could be his brother or best friend or wife, etc. 

Have a poster with the question words and their translation in front of you or on the wall.  While you are circling, point at the words as you say them, as it will take a long time for them to sink in. The French often confuse where/when.  It helps to have a translation visible until they have really acquired them.

There was nothing wrong with what you did for your first lesson and you're right, you want to build up a vocabulary of what we call "high frequency" words, basic building blocks in any communication.  Did you know that there are 100 words that make up 65% of any written text in English?  However, it's important to understand the difference between "learning" and "acquiring".  Basically, you gave your student some basic vocabulary and told him to learn those words/verbs.  If he's motivated and a hard worker he will spend a lot of time doing it.  But they will not be acquired, because the conscious mind learns vocabulary, rules, etc., but the subconscious mind acquires the language.  When vocabulary is acquired, the student can use it spontaneously, without even thinking about it.  By rough estimation it takes 70 repetitions for a word to become acquired.  Fewer for very high interest words (like cuss words, parts of the female anatomy, etc.) and more for very boring stuff.  Which is why we circle.

We don't present students with lists of pronouns to learn.  That's probably how you and I both learned French, but we're part of the estimated 4% of the population that can learn a foreign language in that abstract way.  And as old as I am, I can still remember that it took me a long time to get those horrible pronouns sorted out.  With TPRS you present pronouns (and everything else) in context.  In a private lesson you'll be using I and you a lot, so your student will learn them first of course.  Then you start a story about Jim, so he'll be hearing he/him/his, always in context.  If your student asks "what does him mean?" you tell him. and circle the sentence with "him" in it.  Later, when you come across "him" again, you ask the student to find the word that means "lui".  another time you'll ask him, "what does 'him' mean?" These are what we call pop-up questions.  I call it homeopathic grammar, because a pop-up question should only last a few seconds.

In your next lesson, be sure you talk about a woman, so you'll be using she, her.

At some point you'll want to talk about more than one person, so you'll have they/them/their.  Much later, you can compare Americans and French people and use "we/us/our". Note that in the story of Pirate the dog, I introduced dialog.  This was to get in I/you.

Krashen believes that our subconscious minds acquire another language when we are so focused on content that we forget it's in another language. This is what we try to do with students, making the stories so fun and interesting that the students forget they're in a different language.  That doesn't happen every time (when it does we call it a "homerun") but Blaine Ray says that "Even bad TPRS is pretty good."   

Letters to Kelsey - 1

I received an e-mail ...
from a young American who is in France as a language assistant. She is going to give private lessons to an adult who needs English for his work.  She asked: 

Would you mind giving me a few pointers for his first lesson? So what do you think?  How should I start?  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Kelsey

My reply: 

I have similar students.  I'm attaching stories that I did with them.  If he hasn't studied since 5ème, you should consider him a beginner.  I would start with has/ wants/ gives as structures.  These are high frequency verbs that will come into almost all your following lessons.

Do you understand about circling?  I wish you were closer to me so I could demonstrate.  But there are videos of Ben Slavic in class, which can help you to get an idea, too.  And there are several blogs which help a lot.  Ben Slavic has lots of resources that are free.  It's too bad you didn't get his book.  It’s worth every penny because it takes you through the whole process a step at a time. I probably should ask him for a commission, but he has a wonderful knack for asking important questions and coming up with well-expressed, comprehensible answers.

Your student may want to say has got instead of has.  All the French manuals teach has got.  I think this is unfortunate because it leads to a lot of confusion and mistakes, so I steer away from that and teach has - doesn't have - do you have? so that the structure will work with all the other verbs they learn, whereas has got is a dead end and it’s so high frequency that they are sure to pick it up later anyway.

I'm also attaching a poster with the question words which I give to my students and point to throughout the lesson. The principle is quite simple. You present has/ have and explain that they mean a/ai, as,avons, avez, ont. This is a good time to explain that English is simpler than French and it only gets complicated when you try to compare the two grammars.  Then you ask him if he has....whatever.  Ideally a word he already knows or a cognate or a brand name.  An I-pad?  a guitar?  Whatever he might have and that interests him.  You can fish around and try several things until you see his eyes light up and you know you're talking about something that interests him.  You talk about who has it and who doesn't have it and you circle, circle, circle.  You can work in colors and numbers and sizes at this point.  I have two big white cats and you have one little black cat, etc. You try to speak English all the time, but you also want him to understand everything you say. If you see a blank look, you "sandwich" the part he didn't understand.  That is you say it in English, then in French and then in English again, so he's hearing the translation between two repetitions of the English word.  After a couple times, the blank look will go away.  Hopefully.  

Once you've decided that he has/doesn't have something, you talk about who wants it. and you circle the structure wants in the same way. If he doesn't have something he wants, you've got the beginning of a story.  Then you move on to gives.  You can see in the Stories document what a group of twelve year old boys (in 5ème) did with this.  It usually takes about an hour to build up a story.  At any point if you can work in some genuine conversation that is 100% comprehensible, you'll both be well on your way to success.  The best TPRS teachers "just chat" with their students.

For the next hour you can either type up the story you made together, or a different one that uses the same vocabulary. You read the story a sentence at a time.

  I ask beginners to translate the sentence, which helps me verify that they are understanding and understanding correctly. I know that some teachers scorn translation because it has been much abused.  In the past that's all traditional teachers did in class and I'm old enough to remember such classes.  In my junior year I was taking both Latin and Spanish from the same teacher.  In both classes we memorized lists of vocabulary, translated a text and answered questions about the text.  In short she taught Spanish with the same method she used to teach a dead language.

What is different with TPRS is that you use translation to be sure that the student understands, and I find that it helps to clarify a lot of misunderstandings. Without translation, students will take a long time to distinguish between looks at / sees, listens / hears, etc.

But we only translate one sentence at a time. Then we circle the sentence.  One sentence can produce over fifteen questions.  Be careful not to ask for complete sentences when he answers.  A one word answer shows that he understands the question.  Otherwise he just repeats the original sentence back to you over and over again.  Which doesn’t show that he understands and is “chiant” as one student told me.  (translation = f-king boring)

Basically, that's a TPRS lesson.  Step one is presenting the three structures, Step two is asking personalized questions using the structures and moving on into a story.  Step three is the reading.  For "homework" I make up crossword puzzles using the vocabulary, so they go back and reread the story to find the words that will fit into the puzzle.  I give adults homework because otherwise they may not do anything with English until the next lesson.  But homework should always be getting them to listen to something or to read something, never output (writing).

I hope this helps.  Good luck!

From Jeff Klamka....

This was posted on the moretprs forum some time ago, and I saved it because I found it was an excellent description of what a language class should be. 

Some important principles for an acquisition-based language class:

1) Language acquisition is a skill. It is something that the brain does naturally and subconsciously given the right conditions. The subconscious part is key because you are developing fluency without even being aware of it. All the student has to do is listen or read and understand. The brain will automatically acquire the language.

2) In learning a language, like learning a sport, developing instincts is crucial. For example, when learning to ski, is it more effective to study theory and understand how it works, or just get a feel for it? One of my best ski instructors gave us life savers and had us focus on pinning them to the roofs of our mouths as we skied down the mountain. This allowed us to "quiet" our conscious minds and let our instincts take over. Sometimes in sports, the more you think, the slower you react. Language acquisition works in quite the same way. Ideally, students will be so riveted by the conversation that they forget that they are learning a language. 

3) When speaking, it is really hard to focus on the message and the structure at the same time. That is why consciously-learned rules of language are really only useful for the editing phase of writing. For speaking, it is the unconsciously acquired grammatical structure that the speaker must rely upon. In other words, in conversation there is only enough time to say what "sounds right," and not enough time to analyze why.

4) During class, the strategy is to give students as much repetitive, interesting, and grammatically-correct language as possible. It must be at a level that is comprehensible to students. They are focused on the meaning (and answering questions about the meaning) and their subconscious minds "pick up" the language.

Jeff Klamka

How to get students to write ...

When you ask a student to retell a story, it's doable because they've been hearing the structures and words they need over and over again as you asked and circled your way through the story.  Retelling is production or output, but you only do it after tons of input.  Writing works the same way.  They can produce good, coherent writing using correct structures only after they've been reading and done tons of reading.  So I probably wouldn't ask beginners to do much writing at all.  Perhaps simply ask them to write down the story after several have been able to retell it.

When you do ask them to write, have them do it in class and only for a maximum of ten minutes.  There are TPRS people who say five, but it takes my French students five minutes to get their pens out, so I went for ten.  At the end of ten minutes I told them to draw a line and count their words.  I didn't get hysterical if someone finished a sentence.  Their grade was based on the number of words.  My own system, to be adapted, was to do three "fluency writings" in a trimester.  I graded them by giving one point if they wrote something, two points if they wrote more than 50 words and three points if they wrote more than a hundred.  So they could get 9 out of 10 with three grades and most students managed to get 6.  (Students with less than 5 could try to do another one at home.)  I would read through their texts, but I DID NOT correct or underline mistakes. ( By the way, underlining things in red is a big mistake, because invariably they remember what was underlined and repeat the same mistake over and over again.)  I would draw smile faces next to something I liked or found funny or interesting.  That means, I read for content, to learn more about my students and not to give them a grade.  Occasionally, if I found something that was really excellent in content and with very few grammar mistakes, I gave an extra bonus point, so it was possible for a student to have 10/10.  

As students become more autonomous and get into writing in English, you can assign it as homework.  I liked to do it over a two week holiday.  I would ask them to write 10 minutes a day for 10 days.  Then I would collect and grade them over ten.   They could write about anything they wanted.  Retell stories, invent stories, nightmares, etc., but a lot ended up making a kind of journal out of it, and I found those the most interesting because I learned so much about my students through their journals.  But it was always their choice and I told them that the things they wrote didn't have to be true.

Since I taught in lycée, my students had to learn to write long essays to prepare for the bac.  Again, I worked on quantity.  If students get to the point that they can produce a fair amount of text, you will find that the quality rather miraculously follows.  I'm rather proud of the fact that my colleagues recognized that my students wrote well.  I would give my students a typical "bac" subject and the minimum number of required words.  They would have one hour to do it in class, with dictionaries and me going around answering questions.  This was their first draft and I made it clear that if they wrote the required number of words they would have 10/10.  Most, but not all, lycée students can do this.  I collected the papers and underlined IN GREEN everything that was correct.  I made no annotations or suggestions.  I then returned the papers and they had one week to rewrite it and recopy it.  Sometimes I let them do this in class because there's a lot of learning going on when a students asks "Why isn't this right?"  When I collected the papers again, I asked for the original as well as the final draft.  It was interesting to compare and see what they had done to improve their texts.  And sometimes I could see that the final version had a mistake that I had overlooked the first time through, so I didn't penalize it.

This is a double correction, which my colleagues always insisted was too much work, but it was effective and I had far fewer mistakes to correct in the final draft.  I found it doable.  I gave the final draft a grade over 20 for "quality".  By weeding out the careless mistakes that they found easy to correct with the first draft, I was able to see which structures were still giving them problems and needed more work in class.  Most students were able to get a passing grade, especially with the "quantity" grade over ten to boost them, so they felt successful and less intimidated at the idea of writing in English.

If you have to have a manual, I suggest that you take a text from your manual which is towards the end of the year, something that appears quite difficult, and over a trimester you work on the structures and vocabulary, incorporated into several TPRS stories, without ever assigning the actual text.  Then, when you think they are ready, have them read the text in class and answer questions about it as a test.  I would expect them to do well on it and that should convince them that your method is effective.  You can also use the results of your test to show your non-TPRS colleagues that your students are learning and are up to standard.

Good luck.  And enjoy.  I'm still teaching, but this year most of my students are adults and I find I really miss my classes.  Believe it or not, I miss the troublemakers most of all, because they're the ones who give you the most satisfaction when you actually get through to them.

What is circling?

Some sent me a message asking, "What is this circling all about?  Doesn't it get boring?"

Dear Bunny,

I would assume that you know what circling is, but just in case.... when you "ask" a story, you begin with a statement.  There is a boy named Charlie who has a big black dog.  Then you circle the statement by asking as many questions as possible.   Is there a boy or is there a girl?  Is his name Charlie or is his name Gottfried? Does he have a dog or a cat?  Who has a dog?  What does Charlie have? Is it a big dog or a small dog? What color is his dog? etc..

It might seem to you that asking questions about the same sentence over and over can only be boring.  But what I experienced as a student in TPRS training sessions was that I was straining to understand each question and feeling encouraged when I realized that yes, I had understood the question correctly.  And then the teacher would ask the same thing in a slightly different form, and it was a whole new ball game to me.  The trick is to know your students' levels. If they are very weak, you might want to stick to yes/no, either/or questions.  If they have a fairly good level, you can skip the yes/no and go straight into who,what, where, etc. The more advanced your class is, the less circling you do.  but the new structures that you are introducing need to be thoroughly circled.  I think it's Susie Gross who calls it "parking."  Instead of going on with the narration of the story, you park on a structure and circle it until you see that the students have grasped it and are no longer clutching at straws, trying to guess what it might mean.

One mistake that I made when I first began circling was to ask for complete sentences from my students.  Then it quickly got very boring, because every answer was the same sentence.  They didn't have to understand what I was asking, all they had to do was repeat the original sentence, knowing the answer was in there somewhere.  It's the incomplete, one word answers that show that your students have understood your question. and it's the effort they have to make to correctly understand your question and give the right answer that makes circling interesting.  The teacher's job is to make it just challenging enough to keep it interesting.

Hey! It works!

As the school year kicks off in the United States, there are several postings on the moretprs forum of teachers who want to share the enthusiasm theTPRS method produces with their students.  Here is one of them:

2

First written story in Sp 1

 

I had a wonderful first week of school after attending the NTPRS conference. After doing some personal questions,I had students saying, "Ask me now. I want to be sure I understand too." I have never had a student ask me to ask him/her a question in Spanish in all my years of teaching. I never had so many students laughing in class either! So much more enjoyable for them and me. It really is all about personalization. At the end of four days they were able to read a story I wrote about a student from our school and one from a rival school. I hope I continue to land on my feet!

Kathleen

Some random thoughts ....

Being Christian

 

Today politicians use the word "Christian" as a badge of honor.  They are quick to assert that they belong to that exclusive club, and quick to assert that their opponents don't.  

When I was growing up, you didn’t hear people say, “I am a Christian.”  I suppose it would have sounded like boasting to people who were only too aware of their imperfections.  Being a Christian was not something you were, it was something you worked at, and it didn't come easy.

My parents were always polite with people who had more money, bigger cars, nicer homes, but they never seemed to admire them for those reasons.  Their admiration went to the few people that they considered "good Christian people." 

In those days, maybe because our parents grew up when everyone was poor, a person was judged by how they lived their lives rather than by the price of their cars.  The highest praise was to say that someone was hard-working and their children were “well-brought up”.  If their faces were scrubbed and their hair neatly combed, it didn’t matter if their clothes were patched and home-made.  

Whether or not someone was a Christian, well that was something private, something that was between them and their God and no one else's business.  You didn't ask anyone if they considered themselves "saved" any more than you asked them how much money they had in the bank.  

Often it was at a funeral that the community awarded the title, "a good Christian".  It was high praise and it sometimes took a lifetime to earn it.

Wisdom from Dr. Seuss

I think I was in my teens when I read my first Dr. Seus book.  I may have been babysitting with my Kunkel cousins, all six or seven of them.  I thought it was a wonderful book, but it was only later when I had children of my own that I realized how extraordinary his books were.  I've used them with students, to give them a feel for the language, but they give me puzzled looks, not really letting go of their inherent French logic enough to enjoy Dr. Seus' games with words.  Here is some    Wisdom from Dr Seuss

Using a song in class

I like to use country music with students because of the story element.  I've also found that country music, being old-fashioned to today's students, is neutral territory.  Many young students identify with a certain kind of music and may have an almost tribal reaction to music that represents another type of student.

This is a description of how I use Saginaw, Michigan by Lefty Frizzell in the classroom.  I begin by telling the students the story of the song.  Then I give them the following vocabulary list to help them recognize words they would hear in the song and might not know.

a claim, hard-working, wealthy, good enough, to claim, to dig, ground, to pray, to strike it rich, father-in-law, greedy, It serves him right, to miss, least of all, newly-weds, ashamed

I explain each word, give an example and use these questions for PQA:

1. Who has a claim to this bag?

2.  Are you hard-working?  Is he?

3.  How could you become wealthy?

4.  Are you good enough in English to go to the U.S.A.?

5.  Do you claim to be a good student?

6.  Where did you dig?

7.  What have you found in the ground?

8.  When/where do you pray?

9.  How could you strike it rich?

10.  Where could you hit a strike?

11.  Do you know your future father-in-law?

12.  Are you greedy?  Do you have greedy friends?

13.  When did you think, "It serves me right"?

14.  Do you have friends who are newly-wed?

15.  When was the last time you were ashamed?

16.  Who do you miss?

17.  What school subject do you like least of all?

I don’t expect students to retain all of this vocabulary.  But when they listen to the song, they will recognize the words they hear and find the song easier to comprehend.

I then ask them to listen to the song and fill in the blanks in a cloze exercise.

I was _____________ in Saginaw, Michigan.

I grew up in a ________________ in Saginaw Bay.

My dad was a ___________, hard-working Saginaw fisherman.

Too many __________he came home with too little pay.

I loved a __________in Saginaw, Michigan,

The _____________of a wealthy, wealthy man.

But he called me, "that __________of a Saginaw fisherman,"

Not ____________ enough to claim his daughter's hand.

Now I'm up here in __________, digging around for gold.

Like a crazy fool I'm ___________ in this frozen ground so cold.

But with each new ___________I pray I'll strike it rich, and then

I'll go back _____________and claim my love in Saginaw, Michigan.

I wrote my love, I wrote my love,

In Saginaw, Michigan, Saginaw, Michigan.

I said, "Honey, I'm coming home, ___________wait for me.

And you can tell your dad I'm ___________back a richer man.

I hit the biggest strike in Klondike history.

Her dad met me, her dad met me,

In Saginaw, Michigan, Saginaw, Michigan.

He gave me a great big party with________________.

Then he________, "Son, you wise, young, ambitious man,

Will you __________your father-in-law your Klondike claim?"

___________he's up there in Alaska, digging in the cold, cold ground.

The greedy fool is looking for the gold I never_____________.

It serves him right and ______________here is missing him,

Least of all the newly-weds of Saginaw, Michigan.

We're the happiest man and wife in Saginaw, Michigan.

He's ashamed to show his face in Saginaw, Michigan.

A cloze exercise is not a listening test; it’s listening practice.  The blanks should always correspond to well known vocabulary.  The difficulty is in recognizing words that the students already know when they are sung.  For instance, in this song students may not recognize “little” as the singer pronounces it. As they learn to identify words that are not spoken as slowly and carefully as they are in a classroom, they will become more confident.

When the students have filled in all blanks, we can then discuss the story.  Here are some questions that can get the conversation started.

Where was the singer born?  Was his father a policeman or a fisherman?   Whose daughter did he love?   Was the girl's father rich or poor?  Did the girl’s father want him to marry her? Where did the boy go?  What was he looking for? Where was he digging?  What did he pray every day?  Who did he write to?  Was he coming home a poor man?  Who met him?  What did he drink? What did his father-in-law want?    Who did he sell his Klondike claim to? Where did his father-in-law go?  What is his father-in-law doing? Who is happy?  Who is ashamed?  Is the singer an honest man?

In some classes I found it useful to use the song to work on the following structures:  too many – too few – too much – too little - not good enough.

Here are some suggestions for PQA with these structures:

I have too many cats.   How many cats do you have?  Too many or too few?

How many classes do you have on Friday?

How many euros do you have ? pairs of shoes? Pairs of jeans? Video games?

I have too much work.  How much work do you have?  Too much or too little?

I have too little time.  How much time do you have to play?  Too much or too little?

Money?  Who has too much money?  Who has enough money?

Are you wealthy?  Are you wealthy enough to buy a Ferrari?

Are you old enough to drive a Ferrari? Are you tall enough to play basketball?

Are you strong enough to play rugby? Are you fast enough to play soccer?

Are you intelligent enough to play video games? 

The answer to most of these questions should be yes.  The teacher can then say, “I’m not tall enough to play basketball.  I’m not fast enough to play soccer, etc.

Who likes cats?  Who loves cats?  Who adores cats? Where do you live?  How many cats do you have?  Too many or too few?  

If you have a student who adores cats, you can then lead into the following story, adapting it to your class.  Everything which is underlined can be changed.

There was a boy who had too many cats.  Name?  Where did he live?  How many cats?  73.  Too many or too few?  How many cats did he have?  How many baskets did he have for his cats?  19  Too many or too few?  Did he have enough baskets?  How many mouths did he have to feed?  Did he have enough food?  Too much or too little?  Why?  Did he have too little money or too much money to feed 73 cats?  Was he rich?  Was he wealthy?  Who wasn't wealthy?  He wasn't wealthy enough to feed 73 cats.  Then one day he broke away.  Where did he go?  He came to Agen.  Who did he meet?  He met Camille.  She loved cats, but she had too few cats.  She said, "Will you give me your cats?"  He gave her 54 cats.  She was very happy.  She was the happiest girl in Agen.  Too many or too few?  Enough.  He was happy.  The happiest boy in Z.  He was wealthy enough to feed 19 cats.  He had enough baskets for 19 cats.

After you have created the story with your class, you can ask them to retell it, writing the numbers on the board and pointing at them when the students need to say them.  TPRS teaches numbers in homeopathic doses, so every story should contain numbers.

The following lesson can be reading the story as you have typed it up.  Or simply reading the lyrics to the song.  It would be interesting to try to create a parallel story about a student as you read the lyrics.

Writing a film

Films are input.  When we have the subtitles on the screen, a film is simultaneously oral and written input because the students are hearing and reading at the same time.  With the teacher’s help, the input becomes comprehensible.  Eventually we will want some output from the students.

It is important not to push the students to produce before they are ready, but if the class has been engaging, most students will speak spontaneously to give their opinions about the characters and their problems.

How can we also invite them to write in the target language?  The first step would be a dictation.  In Tprs in a Year Ben Slavic explains how to give a dictation.  The classic French dictation is repeating the text, sentence by sentence, three times.  The first time the students listen to be sure that they understand.  The second time they write and the teacher includes the punctuation.  The third time they reread and correct.  The dictation should consist of phrases from the film, sentences that they have read as subtitles.  Frequent dictations will give them confidence in their ability to write the language and help train their inner monitor to avoid the most common errors.

The next step would be to ask them to write a summary of a scene that has been studied in class and summarized orally. An excellent exercise to prepare weak students for a written summary is to ask the class to do a chain summary.  It is a good idea to begin with the student that has the greatest difficulties, asking him to say what happens first in the scene.  He produces one sentence.  You ask the student next to him to repeat the sentence and add a phrase about what happens next.  The third student repeats the two previous sentences and adds one.  And so on until the scene has been summarized.  You can refuse some phrases if the student skips actions that are important.  If the student makes a minor grammatical mistake, you “echo” what he said, but correctly, and ask him to repeat it again, as if he said it correctly the first time.  Sometimes they need help, which you give them.  

By the time you reach the last student, the class will have heard the summary repeated as many times as there are sentences.  Then you ask them to take out paper and pen and to write the summary.  They should have little difficulty doing it.  Often you’ll see them looking around the room, because looking at the student who first said a sentence will help them remember what the sentence was.

When students are more confident about their ability to summarize a scene, you can ask them to do it in class.  Announce that their compositions will be graded by quantity.  Set the number of words you want and every student that writes something coherent and reaches the minimum number of words will have 10 out of 10 points.  Just as we want students to speak without stopping to think about every word, we want them to write in the same manner.  I have seen fifth year students so paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes that they took an hour to put forty words down on paper.  The technique of fluency writing has been around for a long time and has proved its usefulness.  Once students actually start to “let it flow” and write spontaneously, you will be able to see that they make far fewer mistakes than before when they sweated blood over every word.  Why?  Simply because fluency writing lets their subconscious kick in with its memory of having heard the correct form.

I collect their texts and take them home.  I read through them very quickly, underlining in green everything that is correct and acceptable.  After many years I realized that the reason students repeat the same mistakes over and over again is that we UNDERLINE MISTAKES IN RED!!  So what does the student’s visual memory remember?  The things that were underlined in red, duh! I make no comments and give no hints about what’s wrong with parts that are underlined.  I give the grade of 10/10 to all who have the required number of words and grade the others in proportion.  If they wrote 50 words instead of 100, they have 5/10.  (By the way, they are responsible for counting their words.  If they don’t, they have to settle for my rough estimate.)

I then return the texts to the students and ask them to improve them and recopy them to hand in the following week, for another grade, based on quality this time.  I ask them to hand in both the original draft and the clean, corrected and recopied version.  So when I correct them, I can see which mistakes they were able to correct on their own, and which I need to work on in class.

My colleagues said that students who came from me “knew how to write”, but they also thought that my system involved a double correction and was too much work.  I found that “quantity” grading was fast and easy, because I made no comments.  And the “quality” grading was far less laborious because the students had eliminated a lot of mistakes, and I simply rewrote the remaining errors so they would have an example to guide them in the future.  (When I first started teaching, I spent hours correcting papers with notes and explanations for every mistake.  But I soon saw the students whose papers I’d labored over longest glancing at the grade and wadding up the paper without reading any of my comments.)

I don't write anything but the grade on my students' papers.  If I write anything, it should be in the target language.  I think I did this once, writing a commentary meant to be encouraging at the top of each paper.  After I had handed back their papers, I soon found half the class lined up in front of my desk, wanting a translation!  What I have been doing for many years is using stickers bought in a teacher supply shop in the States on all papers with a passing grade.  My kids get a big kick out of them, even the twenty year olds in a post bac class; the expressions are always positive and it's genuine American culture.