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.
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