The research is there.

TPRS evolved because Blaine Ray considered Stephen Krashen's research into how a second language is acquired fundamental.  Today, in certain circles, it's fashionable to pooh-pooh Krashen and his Comprehensible Input hypothesis.   At the TESOL conference in Paris I heard one of the main speakers refer to it as the "talk until you drop" method.  

First of all, I have read Krashen's five hypotheses and they correspond with my own personal experience as a language learner and as a language teacher for more than fifty years.  They match what I have observed and what I have experienced.  I have seen no research or arguments that can counter that.  If you are not familiar with Krashen's work, there is an excellent summary at  http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

On the other hand, there is research to back up Krashen.  There are his own findings, but also that of others.  One of these studies that I read recently explains how the subconscious is able to grasp and apply grammatical rules that have not been explained to the students.  http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/unconscious-language-learning/ 

This is the goal of TPRS : To present the language so that the subconscious soaks up the structure and spontaneously reproduces correct language.  Students in a school system have only a few hundred hours to learn a foreign language.  We needed thousands of hours of immersion to learn to speak our native language.  It seems logical that class hours should be devoted almost exclusively to concentrated comprehensible input, that any time given to talking about grammar in the native language is wasting our limited time.  However fascinating the intricacies of grammar may be, we can not expect young learners to share our fascination.  Most young students are excited about learning to communicate in another language.  Their excitement and motivation soon die away when confronted with lectures on whether or not the genitive form can be used with inanimate subjects.  (Which is a question that not all native speakers agree on.)

I'm constantly trying to find metaphors to explain to students, and their parents, the difference between acquiring a language and learning a language.  Acquiring targets the subconscious whereas learning a language targets the conscious mind.  I recently used the metaphor of passing a driving test.  My daughter-in-law, a very intelligent, hard-working person who was highly motivated, failed her first driving test.  She had done nothing very wrong, but the examiner felt that she wasn't ready to drive on her own.  She retook the test a few weeks later and passed it.  My explanation is that the first time her conscious mind was in control and she was thinking through every action.  The examiner saw that she had not yet acquired the automatic reactions that a good driver must have.  The second time she was more relaxed because she had decided that if she failed, she would keep trying until she passed it, and she let her subconscious guide her.  The examiner saw that she had the spontaneous reflexes she needed.

Stephen Krashen calls the conscious mind that intervenes to tell us how to speak the language our "monitor".  The monitor is an editor.  It's very effective when we have produced a written text to go over it and correct the mistakes we perceive.  It becomes disastrous when we let the monitor take over our spoken language.  We hesitate, we repeat ourselves, we stumble, and we get very little out.  This happens because we are thinking more about the form than the content.  When students concentrate on content and forget form, their language will be as correct as possible, given the input they have received.  I've often noticed during oral exams, that a student will say something correctly, stop, think about a grammar rule, and then say it differently and incorrectly.  Here the monitor is intervening, hindering correct expression, like a backseat driver who hasn't seen the signs saying no left turn.

"Talk until you drop"?  There are teachers doing this.  In France teachers are instructed to use the target language exclusively.  There's no question that most English language teachers in France speak excellent English and can furnish a good model for their students.  They give input, yet their students do not seem to acquire the language.  Why?  Because they are not trained to make their input comprehensible.  I once asked a colleague with a lovely British accent to talk to one of my classes about a subject in which she was far more knowledgeable than I was.  She spoke so quickly that even I had difficulty understanding her at times and used her expert's vocabulary.  The students soon stopped making any effort to understand her.  She was not giving them comprehensible input.

I later asked another person to speak to the class on the same subject.  His English was only slightly better than theirs.  He spoke slowly and used his own limited vocabulary.  The students were hanging on every word because they were understanding him.  He was not as good a model as she could have been, but his input was comprehensible.  Teachers who talk until they drop without furnishing comprehensible input can not produce fluent speakers.  Their example should not be used to refute Krashen's theories.

Many of these teachers will tell you that their students can not follow their grammatical explanations, so that part of the lesson has to be in French.  TPRS finds that lengthy grammatical explanations are irrelevant.  Grammar is pointed out in "pop-up" questions that take only a few seconds.  It's important to note the reversal in the order.  Traditional grammar explains a rule, furnishes examples and then drills the mechanism.  In TPRS classes students hear the structure many times, and when it has been acquired, the teacher points out how it affects meaning. Because the students have already acquired the structure, it only takes a few seconds to highlight the mechanism.  So we have traditional teachers speaking in the TL for most of the lesson, but switching to the native language whenever it's important to be understood.  Doesn't that give the message to students that trying to understand is a wasted effort because anything that's really important will be in their native language?

Hello again!

Today I went to the home of two boys that I taught in primary school two years ago.

Their mother wanted me to help them because now they are in middle school and they are having difficulties.  I sat and talked to them in English for half an hour.  I asked them if they had bicycles and we talked about their bicycles, their dog and their cats.  We talked about what they like to do, how they go to school, what they want for Christmas.  We had a real conversation.  All in English.  I was delighted to see that they had retained quite a bit of what I had taught them.  They were both using "so-so", an expression I taught and which is not in the middle school textbooks.  

I asked to see their notebooks to see where the problem was.  I saw a page where next to an example in English there was an explanation of the genitive form.  The explanation was in French.  Do you think a thirteen year old boy knows what genitive means?  Do you think the average native English speaker knows what genitive means?  Do you think that a well-educated French person who has not studied English or Latin in the university knows what "génitif" means?  

I can help these boys learn to speak English better.  We can continue to chat in English and their English will improve.  But I explained to the parents that I will not spend time helping them to do pointless exercises that are a waste of valuable class time.  Does being able to recite a rule of English grammar in French make anyone a better English speaker?

It takes thousands of hours to become a fluent speaker of a foreign language.  Students have only a few hundred hours in class.  So shouldn't we be putting that precious time to the best possible use, speaking the language, rather than talking about the language in their mother tongue?

Report on TESOL France

The conference began Friday afternoon and lasted until Sunday afternoon.  I really didn’t know what to expect in the crowd at this national conference (350 people attended). I thought I’d probably be seeing a lot of British people. And I did, but there were also a lot more Americans than I thought I’d see, as a matter of fact the President and Vice-President of TESOL France are Americans and there were several other “speakers” who were American like me. The first big surprise was that though this is TESOL France, people were coming from all over the world to attend. There were quite a few people from Eastern Europe, Ukrania, Slovakia, Macedonia, Roumainia and Russia, and there were people from Saudi Arabia, etc. I guess if you want to go to a TESOL conference, why not pick one in Paris? The three “plenary” speakers were Brazilian, Canadian and Chinese.

Most of the people present seemed to work in private language schools or at the university level. There were very few native French who taught in the French education system. I quickly realized that I wouldn’t have to convince my audience that “grammar instruction” is not the only way to go.

I discovered something called Dogme, which has nothing to do with dogma, but with a Danish film movement which was about using no artificial lighting but filming the action as it happened, if I got that right. It was interesting and I went to two talks about it. The idea is that the teacher gets her students talking and then focuses on something they say which becomes the backbone of her lesson. That is, (this is my personal interpretation) she identifies their needs by listening to their “emergeant language” and builds her lesson around a perceived need. I think we do this in TPRS all the time without asking our students to “chat” at the beginning of every lesson. But a lot of things that were said in these two talks fitted in very well with CI and TPRS. I can see how the idea of asking students to start a conversation, which would mean starting the lesson with output, would be quite difficult to justify in 1st or 2nd year, but later it might be interesting to try. And I heard favorable references to Krashen and Comprehensible Input by more than one speaker.

I also heard a speaker put down Krashen by saying he supported “the teacher talks until he drops” method and claiming that students who were taught that way never became speakers of the language. I think that his portrait was pretty much based on the kind of teachers who talk in the TL all the time without worrying about making their Input comprehensible to their students. I’ve often seen this in France where teachers are supposed to use TL all the time, and students sit through years of English classes and come out with a beginner’s level because they didn’t understand what was being said. When I did my own presentation I took care to insist on the fact that Krashen says that the Input should be both comprehensible and compelling and that TPRS was a way of doing that.

Two other interesting ideas that I picked up were “a journal dialogue” and “minisagas”. A journal dialogue is basically fluency writing where the teacher responds to what the student has written, not by correcting it but by responding to the student’s content. The teacher did this in only one class, because it was time-consuming, but had journals to show how far the students had progressed. In retrospect, I wonder how much time teachers spend "correcting" student's written production with red pens.  I doubt that responding to content rather than grammatical correction would take up as much time.  

Mini-sagas involve asking students to write a story with beginning, middle and end in only 50 words. And exactly 50 words. The idea is that they have to manipulate the language, look for synonyms, learn to make their language more effective and more precise to make it fit into the limits of a mini-saga. Again, I saw this as something that would be interesting with upper-level students.

What about my talk? It was on Sunday morning. That gave me time to “network” on Friday and Saturday.  When people saw TPRS on my badge, I had a chance to try to explain what TPRS is without boring them, kind of practicing for my talk. Sunday morning 10 o’clock was probably not the best slot, since many people living in the Parisian area only came for the Saturday activities and I heard people from out of France saying they were going to see the Eiffel Tower, and others overslept, but I had about 20 people present. There were six or seven other talks going on at the same time, so that was a fairly good turnout for something that people had never heard of before. I had 30 handouts and gave them all out because some people who had not been able to attend asked me for my handout.

I had been working hard to make my talk fit into the limits of one hour, but people tended to dribble in, so I wasn’t able to start on time. I wanted to give at least a brief demonstration of TPRS using a language people didn’t already know, and had asked a woman from Ukrania to be my teacher. She didn’t show up until the end when she apologized because she had been caught in a rainstorm on the way and had to go back to her hotel and change her clothes. But there was a woman from Croatia in the front row who graciously accepted to teach us Croatian. I gave people jobs, chose a barometer (a man from Saudi Arabia who looked rather skeptical) asked someone to tally how many times I said Comprehensible Input and tried to give them the necessary background in how the method had evolved and why I considered it a revolution, how I had first heard about it, and what it involved. Then we very quickly did the lesson in Croatian, using “has” as our structure, writing it on the board and going to “Kellie ima Rolls Royce.” We then asked people who has a Rolls Royce, What does Kellie have, we asked the man from Saudi Arabia if he had a Rolls Royce and he told us he had a Caprice (?). It could have gone on much longer, and I will definitely try this again, because the participants were really enjoying it. I explained why I chose Rolls Royce and how we use universally known brand names to adapt to beginners’ limited vocabulary.

A man sitting in the front row was nodding enthusiastically throughout the talk, but commented that he didn’t accept the Learning/Acquiring distinction and feels that learning is more important than Krashen says. I had been expecting something like this and replied that to me, having taught English to French speakers for 55 years, Krashen’s hypothesis clicks with my personal experience. And I pointed out that he was a 4%er as most language teachers are, and I proposed my own personal explanation that 4%ers are able to learn with little Comprehensible Input because we go over lessons and replay things in our heads, compensating for the lack of CI. (I know I did this all the time when I was learning French.)

Only two people had ever heard of TPRS before. One was Marie-Pierre Journaud, who is on the moretprs list and was the person who advised me to apply to the TESOL conference. She teaches native French who want to become English teachers. Since they are all 4%ers, she says that they don’t understand the importance of TPRS because they don’t realize there’s a problem. They are still assuming that their future students will be able to learn the way they did.

The other was an American university teacher who says that she had read about TPRS in a course that reviewed different methods but had never seen it practiced. I’m pretty sure that she’s going to be looking it up when she goes back to the States.

A woman came up to me as soon as my talk was over and was very enthusiastic, saying she was definitely going to try it out. She does private tutoring and said it was just the thing for one of her older beginners who kept saying, “But I don’t understand! It’s all Chinese to me.”

I had to cut off the end, because the next speaker was urgently wanting to take over the room and the participants had to rush to get to the other talks. I really regret that there was no opportunity to chat with people who were present and answer some of their questions. But at least there are 20 people who had never heard of TPRS before and are now curious.

TESOL FRANCE - Here I come!

I leave tomorrow morning for Paris on the TGV.  I'm going to present TPRS at the annual TESOL Conference in France.  Tesol means Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

I've decided not to try to do a Power point.  It would probably bug anyway.  I only have an hour, and I doubt that anyone has ever made the momentous decision of entirely changing the way they teach after an hour long talk. All I can do in an hour is spark their curiosity and point them towards online sites that can help them understand what TPRS is all about.

So I'm simply going to talk to the people who come to listen to me.  There are six or seven speakers at the same time, so the competition is going to be stiff.  I'm going to tell them a bit about me and my journey on the TPRS road.  I thought I would assign tasks, as I would in a TPRS class.  Ask someone to sketch scenes from my story, ask someone to count the number of times I say comprehensible input, assign barometers who are to signal when they don't understand.

And then I have this daring idea.  I wanted to demonstrate with my son Daniel.  He teaches Breton and I thought I could coach him through a lesson.  But he can't make it, and everyone present speaks English and French, the only languages I speak fluently.  I know, Carol Gaab learned enough Hebrew from her telephone answering machine to give her first workshop in Hebrew, but I'm not Carol Gaab.  So I'm going to look for someone in the audience who speaks a little known language, maybe even Breton, and coach them through some PQA with "He has".  I told Ben Slavic about my idea and he was too kind to say he thought I was crazy, but he did suggest that I just do it in English.

The problem is that everyone in the room will be an English teacher.  So I'm going to try.  

I've prepared a handout with TPRS sites and also some information about some of the people who practice TPRS in Europe.  There are more than I thought.

Sites to visit:

Blaine Ray – The founder of the movement is still active, giving workshops and mentoring.  He can always be picked out in a crowd.  He’s the guy in a shirt with palm trees and bright blue parrots. http://www.blaineraytprs.com/ 

Stephen Krashen His work on Comprehensible Input is the solid foundation on which TPRS is built. www.sdkrashen.com

Susie Gross was one of the first to understand the importance of Blaine Ray’s techniques. Her “influence on the current massive change in foreign language education in the US cannot be overstated.” http://susangrosstprs.com/

Daily Kos - For an unbiased review of “the Green Bible.”  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/18/1066137/-Book-Review-Fluency-through-TPR-Storytelling

Laurie Clarq – An experienced teacher, workshop presenter and frequent participant in moretprs discussions, Laurie is always able to embrace two sides of an argument by seeing the hearts behind the words. She helped develop the recent innovation in reading called “Embedded Reading” which is explained on her site. http://blog.heartsforteaching.com/

Ben Slavic – My guru – Ben has a way of saying things that resonates with me.  His book TPRS in a Year helped me to see how all the pieces fitted together. His web site has free resources and videos of him in class. For the price of a monthly cup of coffee, it’s possible to participate in his Professional Learning Community.  The books can be downloaded.  http://www.benslavic.com/

The American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages has taken the position that 90% of classroom speech should be in the target language and suggests that TPRS is an effective way to achieve this goal. *http://www.actfl.org/publications/the-language-educator/sample-articles

Karen Rowan manages Fluency Fast, TPRS courses for adults and helps edit The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, which often carries articles by Stephen Krashen and other big names in the TPRS world.  You can find her at www.TPRStories.com or www.fluencyfast.com . You can subscribe to the free online version of IJFLT at www.tprstories.com/ijflt .

Carol Gaab is a spectacular demonstrator when she’s not publishing material for teachers, writing readers for students or traveling to workshops around the world.  www.tprstorytelling.com

Jason Fritz is another early member of the TPRS adventure.  He has taken the Reading in TPRS and made it something exciting which he calls Reading Theater. www.comprehensibleinput.com .  He founded the International Forum on Language Teaching which is at www.iflt.org

Teri Wiechart is one of a group of TPRS teachers who have worked to improve coaching at conferences and in the classroom. You can contact her  to learn more about coaching at profdev@ofla-online.org or twiechart@hotmail.com .

Moretprs This is a yahoo group forum which began early in the millennium with a handful of teachers who were trying TPRS and wanted to exchange ideas.  There are now over 6000 followers and daily digests. Blaine Ray, Susie Gross, Karen Rowan, Stephen Krashen and many other well known names participate regularly in the discussions. Beginners often describe their difficulties and ask for advice. Here is where information is posted concerning workshops and National TPRS Conference.  Go to www.yahoogroups.com and register to follow the discussions. 

TPRS IN EUROPE

Great Britain –  
Keith Rogers – a Latin and Ancient Greek teacher at Rochester Grammar School who uses TPRS and recently organised the first TPRS workshops (given by Blaine Ray) in the UK (see  http://www.smore.com/rk54)  which attracted 24 delegates. Keith has spoken on the principles of TPRS at various gatherings of Classical teachers (ROSA cluster group, Association of Latin Teachers Summer School, Joint Association of Classical Teachers INSET day, local feeder schools gathering, to student teachers on the King’s College teacher training course and at Septimana Latina  (in Latin!)).  He will be giving future talks to the Guildford Association of Classical Teachers and running an introduction to TPRS workshop at the Association of Latin Teachers summer school in 2013.
 
The Netherlands – Alike Last teaches French and does TPRS workshops for teachers.

Kirstin Plante and Iris Maas are both Spanish teachers, and the founders of TPRS Nederland, a teacher training company for TPRS. Kirstin owns a language institute near Amsterdam and teaches uniquely with TPRS. Iris works at a Hotel Management School and uses TPRS wherever and whenever she can. Together they give numerous workshops throughout the Netherlands and Europe, and they run a European webshop for TPRS materials.

General website: www.tprsnederland.com (Dutch)

Shop: www.tprswebshop.com (people in France can order here as well)

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TPRSNederland (English and Dutch)

twitter: Kirstin Plante (English and Dutch)

Spain  - Ignacio Almandoz gives private lessons in English and in Spanish. He says, “After 4 years, I'm still excited about teaching with TPRS and learning through CI.  (I'm currently learning Russian, German, Portuguese and Italian) without studying the grammar or doing exercises in the traditional way. So I'm trying all these techniques and possibilities on myself. It helps me understand much better the teaching and learning process. My own students are making me a better teacher day after day.”  You can contact Ignacio by Skype at blueaspen or by e-mail at lamparamaravillosa@gmail.com.

Germany – Martin Anders teaches at Kaltenkirchen Waldorf School and has been using TPRS for four years.  His site is at 

http://tprs-for-germany.com/blog/?page_id=12 

He says, “I am absolutely convinced that TPRS will be able to improve our teachingmethods, add interest and fun to our lessons and to improve language acquisition which – up to now – is quite mediocre.”  

France Judith Logsdon-Dubois, professeur agrégé. I taught in a French lycée from 1995 to 2012.  Before that I taught English in French-speaking Cameroon.  I first heard of TPRS in 2006; I began using it the following year.  Once I saw how effective it was, I could never go back.  Today I give private lessons and train teachers. I have a poorly organized blog called Mrs. D's Funny Little Classroom -  http://funnylittleclassroom.blogspot.fr  To contact me:  judyldubois@aol.com .

You could have!

You could have is an expression that gives a lot of problems to native French speakers.  They tend to want to translate it literally, Vous pouviez avoir, which means you had the possibility to have ??? And even when they learn to recognize and understand it, they hesitate to use it.

Here is a story I saw on the internet which gives all the repetition that we look for in a TPRS story, the repetition that students need to acquire a structure.  And it's funny, which makes it compelling input.  As soon as I saw it, I mailed it to all of my adult students.

A married couple was traveling by car from Victoria to Prince George .

Being seniors, after almost eleven hours on the road, they were too tired to continue and decided to take a room. But, they only planned to sleep for four hours and then get back on the road.

When they checked out four hours later, the desk clerk handed them a bill for $350.00.

The man exploded and demanded to know why the charge was so high. He told the clerk, "Although it's a nice hotel, the rooms certainly aren't worth $350.00 for four hours." Then the clerk told him that $350.00 was the 'standard rate'.  The man insisted on speaking to the Manager.

The Manager appeared, listened to him, and then explained that the hotel had an Olympic-sized pool and a huge conference center that were available for them to use.

"But we didn't use them," the husband said.

"Well, they are here, and you could have," explained the Manager.

The Manager went on to explain that the couple could also have taken in one of the shows for which the hotel is famous. "We have the best entertainers from New York , Hollywood , and Las Vegas perform here," the Manager said.

"But we didn't go to any of those shows," the husband said.

"Well, we have them, and you could have," the Manager replied.

No matter what amenity the Manager mentioned, the husband replied, "But we didn't use it!"

The Manager was unmoved, and eventually the husband gave up and agreed to pay. As he didn't have his check book, he asked his wife to write the check.

She did and gave it to the Manager.

The Manager was surprised when he looked at the check. "But ma'am, this is made out for only $50.00."

"That's correct. I charged you $300.00 for sleeping with me," she replied.

"But I didn't!" exclaimed the Manager.

"Well, too bad, I was here, and you could have."

Is Classroom Management a Dirty Word?

On Ben Slavic's Professional Learning Community there has been an ongoing debate about how to obtain optimal learning conditions in class, that is students who are listening attentively and not blurting things out in their native language.

The members of Ben's community have developed a rubric called jGR (jenn's great Rubric) for grading how well a student participates in the interactive communication going on in the class.  It has been tried by many members of the community and the reports are favorable, but today jenn reported that she is having difficulties with it, finding that having to refer to it constantly drains away her positive energy in class.  She said, "This topic - consequence vs punishment- has been eating me up for a month.

I'm just finishing Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards and it seemed to me that he had quite a bit to contribute to the discussion.  Kohn says that consequence vs punishment is a false debate. At least if I’m understanding him. He has a chapter called “The consequences of consequences” in Punished by Rewards that was quite an eye-opener to me. He says, “if a child tips her chair back too far, she will fall over. That is a ‘natural consequence’ — and the fact that it qualifies for that label offers no argument for letting it happen; caring adults go out of their way to prevent many such consequences from occurring.”

Then he says something which seems pretty relevant. “Some teachers and parents seem to think that consequences are acceptable as long as children have been clearly warned about what will happen if they misbehave. These warnings allow adults to pride themselves on their fairness — and to shrug off complaints — since adequate notice was given before the punishment was imposed. ….. But what is actually promoted by this arrangement? A list of specific rules and consequences establishes a confrontational tone; the message is not that members of a community will work together and try to help someone who stumbles, but that anyone who violates a pre-established edict is in trouble.”

I haven’t yet finished the book, but Kohn is in favor of treating students and even small children as beings who should have a voice in what happens; indeed he argues that the only way to teach them to become responsible, caring adults is to give them that voice. He sees everything else as “control strategies.”

I don’t see jGR as a control strategy. I see it as a definition of the behavior that can help students to master a language. Perhaps we need to be careful of how we present it to students. We might say that several of our friends and colleagues have tried it and it seems very effective in helping students to get the maximum benefit out of their classes. Then we could go through the different levels, explaining why other teachers thought these elements were important and ask students for their opinion. We might ask them to elaborate on the descriptions, whenever possible taking their ideas into account. I think that for jGR to be effective, students have to buy in, and for them to do that they have to have a chance to input. Each class might negotiate a slightly different version of jGR. 

The fact that students need to be listening attentively in order to acquire a language and that blurting out makes it impossible for others to listen attentively is not negotiable, but students should be given a chance to discuss how this can be achieved in their class. Simply seeing that the teacher is honestly interested in their viewpoint can help them adhere to and respect her viewpoint.

I think this is what Kohn has to offer us. He quotes Thomas Gordon who said, “The critical question is not WHETHER limits and rules are needed in families and schools, but rather WHO sets them: the adults alone or the adults and kids — together?”

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.