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. 

Films and embedded texts

Laurie Clarq has developed a technique that she calls « embedded texts » which helps students to develop their reading muscles.  She explains it on the site Hearts for Teaching at http://www.heartsforteaching.com/

 

To make an embedded text you can either start at the bottom and develop more complicated texts, or start at the top with an authentic text and progressively simplify it.  The idea is to give your students a simple text that they have no difficulty reading before giving them a slightly more complicated version that contains everything that was in the first reading.  Then you present a third version that is far more complete, but still contains everything that was in the second reading.  Laurie occasionally uses four or more versions of the same text.

One of the first times that I used her idea, I spent the class hour working on Versions One and Two, and didn’t have time for Three.  So I suggested that the students read it at home in preparation for our next class.  I got a few automatic groans when they saw that Text Three was a full page.  But then one boy glanced over it and saw that he knew almost all the words.  “Hey!  This is easy!” he said and made my day.  

 Embedded texts are like training a horse to jump by raising the bar just a little bit every time.  Each text is just a little more difficult than the one before.  By the time you’ve read and circled the structures and vocabulary in the third version, the students can sight read without any painful decoding. 

It might seem that students would get bored with reading the same thing three times, but this has not been my experience.  Each new version adds new details and new information.  I also believe that the students don’t get bored because they feel successful in being able to read a large amount of text without being stumped every other word.  Success is always motivating. This means that the teacher has to carefully dose the difficulty of each version, but it can be done when you know your students well.

I use embedded texts with films.  They are particularly useful to introduce a scene that has a lot of complex dialog.  I begin with a short summary of the scene and just the essential details.  We read the text in class.  The students translate sentence by sentence and I step in whenever there’s something they don’t know how to translate.  We discuss the summary in the target language and I may digress with some PQA if there are words and structures that make it interesting.

Then I add a few more details and a few more sentences and we read Version 2.  Once again we translate it together.  Working with small groups of weak students, I did this as a whole class activity.  Some teachers might prefer to have the students translate it in groups or even in pairs.  We then discuss the new information.

Finally I use Version 2 as the framework for a fairly complete summary.  When we have read and discussed the last version of the embedded text, most of the structures feel familiar to the students and they are comfortable that they understand it.

We are then ready to watch the scene, which is a kind of Version 4 of the embedded text.  We can discuss it without having to explain vocabulary, so the students are able to concentrate on the deeper meaning and implications of the scene.  Occasionally, with a good class and a film that was taken from a book, we can then move on to the original written passage.  This is a good way to show students that they are capable of reading authentic texts in English – or whatever your target language is.

Here are three embedded texts of a scene from the movie The Mighty:

I

A Doghouse boy put a purse in a sewer grate.  Kevin went to Max’s house and woke him up.  They went out to get the purse back.  Freak opened the sewer grate with a rope tied to a fire escape.  Max climbed down into the sewer. The purse was in the sewer.  He climbed out and gave the purse to Freak.  In the wallet there were a lot of dollars.  Freak and Max were ambushed by the Doghouse boys.  Blade told them to give him the purse.  Max told Freak to give the purse to Blade.  But Freak refused and climbed up the fire escape.  Blade was going to hit Freak with chains.  Max lifted up the sewer grate and ran at Blade and his gang.  The Doghouse boys ran away.  Freak wanted to give the purse back to its owner. 

II

Kevin saw one of the Doghouse boys put a woman’s purse in a sewer grate.  At night he went to Max’s house and woke him up.  He told Max to get dressed.  They went out to get the purse back.  Freak was able to open the sewer grate with a rope tied to a fire escape.  Max climbed down into the sewer where there were rats. The purse was covered in slime.  He climbed out and gave the purse to Freak.  In the wallet there were a lot of dollars and a woman’s driver’s license.  Suddenly  Freak and Max were ambushed by the Doghouse boys.  Blade told them to give him the purse.  Max told Freak to give the purse to Blade.  But Freak refused and climbed up the fire escape.  Blade was going to hit Freak with chains in order to get back the purse.  Max lifted up the sewer grate and ran at Blade and his gang.  The Doghouse boys ran away.  Freak wanted to give the purse back to its rightful owner. 

III

 

Kevin was in his mother’s car when he saw one of the Doghouse boys steal a woman’s purse and put it in a sewer grate.  That night he went to Max’s house and woke him up.  He told Max to get dressed like a knight.  Their quest was to get the purse and give it back to the woman, its rightful owner.  Freak was able to open the sewer grate with a rope tied to a fire escape.  Max climbed down into the sewer where there were rats. He said that he didn’t like rats.  Freak told him that rats don’t like Max.  The purse was covered in slime.  Max climbed out and gave the purse to Freak.  In the wallet there were four hundred dollars and a woman’s driver’s license.  Her name was Loretta Lee.  Suddenly  Freak and Max were ambushed by the Doghouse boys.  Blade told them to give him the purse.  Max told Freak to give the purse to Blade.  But Freak said, “No.”  He climbed up the fire escape.  Blade was going to hit Freak with chains in order to get back the purse.  To protect Freak Max lifted up the sewer grate and ran at Blade and his gang.  The Doghouse boys were frightened.  They were afraid of Max.  They ran away.  Freak said that Max was awesome!