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 …..

Reading a Film III

*The Mighty starts with a long aerial view of Cleveland, Ohio.  Eventually it zooms in on a lower middle class neighborhood and we see Max’s grandparents in a shot that recalls the famous painting, “American Gothic”, by Grant Wood.  Of course my students were not familiar with the painting, so I began by showing a color photocopy to them and discussing it, asking them what they thought about the two persons.  Then we began watching the opening shots of the film and I explained where Cleveland was and that the river was the Ohio river.  My purpose was simply to situate where the film took place.  When they saw the shot of the grandparents, they recognized the allusion to the painting.

We hear Max’s voice off, explaining that his grandparents looked like that “because they got stuck with me.”  At this point, I’m pointing to the English words on the screen subtitles and translating them into French.  When I think the students can translate a sentence, I ask them to do it and help them over the rough spots.  When there’s a word or expression that I think is important, I draw their attention to it.  For instance, if we’ve just translated, “I never had a brain until Freak came along and loaned me his,” I’ll ask them which word means “cerveau”.   Or which word means “jusqu’à”.  

Shortly afterwards we see Max on the bus being harassed by the Doghouse Boys gang and their leader, Blade.  The language is quite simple to understand, so the students can “read” it with little help from me.  Then we discuss the scene and the characters and what we learn about Max and his father. The students are free to guess or imagine different possibilities.  I don’t validate any of them, just saying we’ll wait and see.  At this point the film furnishes an excuse for a conversation with the students, in which they have things to say and opinions to give.  Although we’ve used French to translate the subtitles, we are now completely in English, the target language.  I help them out when they need vocabulary and try to make everything I say 100% comprehensible, but basically we are having a conversation in English about the scene.

One question that comes up frequently is how much help to give to students who lack vocabulary but want to say things.  If they ask for a word, I give it to them without any hesitation and usually write it on the board.  I remember reading a study that showed that while students will forget 95% of a lecture they listened to, they invariably retain the answer to their own question.  So when a student formulates a request for vocabulary, you can be fairly sure that he’ll remember your answer even if he forgets everything else.  I’d never pass on an opportunity like that by telling him to look it up in the dictionary.  If a student asks for an entire sentence, I ask them which word they don’t know how to say.  Occasionally the class rebel will say, “All of them.”  I then repeat his sentence, word by word, and ask the class how to say each word, until we get to a word or expression that stumps them.  And I treat that word with the same seriousness as I would any other request.  After I’ve done this once or twice, students, who don’t want to look dumber than their classmates, will limit their requests to a single word or structure.  

A book has chapters and a film has scenes.  I decide whether I want to study a scene in depth, or simply “read” and discuss it, or, if it is an action scene with little or no dialog, let the students watch it with no pauses. Tomorrow I will discuss how to study a scene in more detail.  To be continued ….

Reading a film II

The first step was choosing a film for the group.  I knew immediately which one I wanted to use.  I had used it before and most students found it not too difficult but very moving and were quickly hooked by the story line.  The Mighty is about two boys who were marginalized at school, the kind of boys that other kids call “Freaks”.

Although Sharon Stone plays in it and the other actors are well known and Sting does the music, the film doesn’t seem to have been a big box-office hit.  The only reason I had ever heard of it was that one of my students had brought it to me and insisted that I watch it. He was a nice boy and I always associate him with my first stumbling attempts at TPRS.

In those days I was doing it all wrong.  I was working with Shawshank Redemption and I wanted to prepare students for the scene in the prison yard where Andy meets Red.  I had a long list of vocabulary words that my students wouldn’t know.  Pickax, skull, gem shop, rock hound, bull queer, lawyer, etc.  My plan was to use a TPRS story to introduce the vocabulary.  Now I know that stories are used to teach structures, not vocabulary, which should be sheltered as much as possible, but in those days I had not yet been able to attend a workshop and I had just started reading Ben Slavic's TPRS in a year.  I scripted a story about a thief getting shot at in front of a gem shop and needing a lawyer.

I began my story with a chimpanzee.  This was a TPRS story, right?  What color was the chimpanzee?  The class eventually proposed purple, and I went for that.  I needed an actor, so I chose the boy who seemed the most likely to play along.  He was a bit of a loner and not very “cool”, but he gave the impression that he enjoyed my classes.  What was the purple chimpanzee’s name?  The class made several suggestions, and someone called out “Darwin!”  My actor grinned at that, so I went with Darwin.  We actually did get through the story and I was able to work in most of the vocabulary I had listed, although I doubt they retained much of it.  But the name Darwin stuck.  The kids started calling him that and he even signed his papers “Darwin” from then on.  Thinking back, I’m sorry I took a chance of making him appear ridiculous in front of the whole class by acting out the story of a purple chimpanzee.  But that was when he brought me the film to watch.  Perhaps he wanted me to understand what it can be like to be a “freak” and how some very brave souls are able to assume the fact that they are different.  

Today I still use Shawshank Redemption with students, but I approach that scene differently.  I give them a short summary of the scene in three versions as an embedded text.  Once they have read through all three versions, they are ready to watch and understand the scene on screen. I now realize that using a story to introduce over twenty vocabulary words is not effective.  As a matter of fact, it's not much different from traditional methods.  But the students enjoyed the story, Darwin found an identity that suited him, and though I blush at the memory of my mistakes, I console myself with the thought that "bad TPRS is better than no TPRS".

I recommend The Mighty to anyone working with teenagers.  I think even students who appear very self-confident worry about not being accepted by others and they adopt the two characters whole-heartedly.  They buy into discussing their problems because they share the same problems.   Personalization doesn't always have to be called personalization.    To be continued …..

"Reading" a film

Everyone agrees that films are life-savers on a Friday afternoon just before the holidays, and that there is a lot of potential in using films in the classroom.  But how much do students really learn while watching a film?  And what about weaker students?  The ones who glare and say, “I don’t understand anything”.  I’ve used films for many years to keep my students interested.  I often gave them cloze activities to do as they listened.  But as I went around the room, I realized that my weak students were unable to recognize even the simplest words.  For them the soundtrack was meaningless noise.

Last year I worked with four groups of students who were failing English in their “seconde” class in a French lycée.  Sitting in classes without understanding anything that was going on, each year they had fallen further and further behind.  Some of them reacted by becoming trouble-makers. Others simply gave up and retreated into their shells, knowing that any effort to participate would cover them in ridicule.

I began doing classic TPRS with them and I soon had a positive atmosphere with students participating enthusiastically and enjoying their classes.  They had the choice of returning to their regular class at any time and they preferred to stay with me.  As a matter of fact, I used that as the ultimate threat when some of them had to be reminded that I needed attentive students.  Then I worked on a couple of songs with them.  I wanted them to realize that with improved English they could get more enjoyment out of their favorite songs.

I was very aware that there was little chance of the experiment being continued the following year.  I could see that they were progressing but I was afraid that once they were back in a regular class they would find it difficult to keep up and would become discouraged once again.  I wanted them to become autonomous learners.  So I thought about students I had encountered who had attained a high degree of proficiency outside the school system.  And I remembered a girl whose English was so good that I assumed she had lived abroad for many years.  When I asked her, she told me that she had never traveled but she had spent the summer streaming her favorite American series.

I decided to try to teach my students to watch a film in a way that would make them autonomous.  I knew they would need a lot of help at the beginning, but I decided to trust the principle of Comprehensible Input.  If we “read” the subtitles, discussed the meaning, talked about the action, the problems and the characters, they would be hearing the same words and structures over and over again.  Even better, they would be hearing the words as they saw them written on the screen, so the input would be simultaneously written and spoken.  This was not straight TPRS, because the story was the film, but I used the techniques used to read novels by TPRS teachers.                   To be continued …..

Horse-riding and Speaking a Foreign Language

Horse-riding has helped me see the difference between learning and acquiring. Throughout my life, whenever I’m confronted with something new, I go out and buy a book. Laugh all you like, but when I found out I was pregnant for the first time, my first stop was a bookstore. But when you’re sitting on a horse, it doesn’t matter what you’ve memorized and how many chapters you can recite. I have two shelves of books about horse-riding and some of them I’ve read three or four times. Some of it is very valuable information and has helped me to improve, but acquisition is what you do when a barking dog bursts out of the bushes and believe me, you don’t have time to look it up. Horse-riding is about developing automatic reflexes, and that is what fluency requires too. I may have seemed gifted in languages, but I am very much ungifted in riding, and it has opened my eyes to how difficult it is to acquire something to the point where you can do it without thinking about it. I’ve also come to realize that the hardest part in riding and in speaking a foreign language is unlearning bad habits that have been acquired and shouldn’t have been.