A lot of teachers who say they are "eclectic" or "communicative" have a quick glance at TPRS and say, oh, that's a lot like what I do. And they pick up circling or embedded reading and add it as one more tool in their teaching kit.
And there's nothing wrong with that. That's how I first got into TPRS. But as I read more about it, followed the discussions on moretprs and went to workshops and listened to speakers at conferences, I realized that TPRS is not just a technique we can pull out of our hats from time to time. It's a unique approach to language learning, a philosophy, a way of looking at the world that requires honesty. You either believe that people learn to speak a language through comprehensibile input or you don't. And once you have become a true believer, there's no turning back.
I read a few articles by Stephen Krashen, but mostly I followed his comments and arguments on the moretprs forum. He convinced me because everything he said fitted in with my own experience, both as a learner and as a teacher. I was taught German for nine months by a teacher using something like the Natural Approach. (I don't remember her ever giving a name to her method.) I must have acquired something because today, fifty years later, I can still catch the gist of a conversation in German. I studied French, Spanish, Latin and New Testament Greek with more traditional methods and only became fluent in French through immersion. My Spanish, Latin and Greek are long gone.
If we accept that comprehensible input is the key to acquiring language, then it follows that we need to give our students as much input as possible, to use the limited time we have with students as efficiently as possible. Asking students to produce language is what Krashen calls weighing the pig, measuring what has been acquired. And he states quite emphatically that weighing the pig doesn't make it heavier. In the real world we live in, it is necessary to test students and give them grades, but with as little stress as possible. Since TPRS is concerned with what has been acquired in the long term memory and not with what the students have memorized the night before a test, it is suggested that tests be unannounced. Or regular little exit quizzes on what has been acquired during the class.
In a perfect world, students receive maximum input in a relaxed setting, listening to stories that amuse them and touch them, and one day the language just "falls out of their mouths". In an imperfect world an inspector sits in on your class and tells you that you're being too frontal. That you need to organize debates among your students and have them work on projects. Teachers who feel the pressure push their students to produce language, to give presentations, to make reports. Student output looks great in a lesson plan. I've done this. And sat there and cringed at the language I heard. And felt sorry for the shy, tongue-tied student clenching his notes in sweaty hands, never once looking up.
Ben Slavic says, "Output activities should not be done until many hundreds of hours of input have occurred. That's what the best research we have says."
I would like to make the point that forced student output is almost always incorrect, poor quality language when it is not totally incomprehensible. Whether or not it is helping the speaker in any way, it is definitely harmful to the other students to listen to it. When we force output, we oblige the student to try to say things that he has not yet acquired, so he mobilizes his notions of grammar, however vague, and cobbles together sentences that are neither fish nor fowl. The damage comes when he does this often enough that it begins to sound right. And he hears his fellow students saying more or less the same thing, so he's convinced that it is right. Eventually the error is repeated often enough to be acquired. He writes it and his teacher underlines it in red. His brain remembers it, because it was underlined in red. The error becomes fossilized, and it will take a major excavation to get rid of it.
The other day I had a discussion with my riding instructor about mistakes that I make when riding. I know perfectly well what I should be doing, my conscious mind is quite clear about what the correct position should be. I've been taking lessons for almost ten years and I've read dozens of books. But as soon as I become apprehensive, my subconscious takes over and does what it learned to do when I first started riding. I was sixteen when a friend of my father's put me on a horse and told me to kick to make her go forward and to pull on the reins to stop her. Until ten years ago that was my one and only riding lesson. My riding mistakes are fossilized because I wasn't taught correctly at the beginning. The instructor and I agreed that it's much more difficult to unlearn something than it is to learn it correctly from the start. It takes endless hours of conscious practice to erase the wrong muscle memory.
When we give our students high quality comprehensible input without forcing them to produce, we are giving them a chance to learn the correct forms from the start. When we force them to produce before they are ready, we are pushing them to make errors that will become fossilized and be extremely difficult to unlearn.
Michael Jordan once said, "You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong all you will become is very good at shooting wrong." I paraphrased this. "You can practice speaking eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong all you will become is very good at speaking poorly."
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
German update
I'm doing a long translation in a short time frame, so I don't have much leisure to post, though there are several things that I want to talk about, like forced output and why there are so many similarities between learning to ride a horse and learning to speak a language. But I did want y'all to know that I am still working on reactivating my ancient knowledge of German.
I have finished watching "The Green Mile" in German with German subtitles. At first I watched the same scene over and over again, trying to understand as much as possible. I wrote down words that seemed important, but I resisted the temptation to look them up in the dictionary.
Charlotte sent me three German films to watch next. She kindly included a short letter in English with the same letter in German. This was very helpful and has convinced me that bilingual editions are worthwhile. I always scorned them because whenever I picked one up I automatically read either one language or the other. However, I poured over Charlotte's letter in German and enjoyed understanding almost all of it, looking at the English only for the few words that I didn't understand. Please bear in mind that, being a teacher, she knew how to express her ideas in simple phrases that I could understand.
After half a dozen viewings of the first scene of the film, up to the arrival of John, I decided to watch the rest of it in one go. I also decided to stop writing down words that I didn't understand. Instead I wrote down entire phrases that came to me and which I understood. Because as I watch and listen, I'm beginning to realize that I'm not understanding individual words as much as entire phrases. Ich bin müde. Red mit John. Er pisst mich an. Du bist ein böser Mann. I'm sure that I would not have understood any of these out of context. But when I heard them and read them the meaning was quite clear.
I'm wondering if infants first become aware of words or phrases. I've noticed that my bilingual dog, Kribi, who understands both "On va se promener" and "Do you want to go for a walk?" definitely reacts to the complete phrase. If I say "walk" or "promenade" in isolation she cocks her head and looks quizzical, while the complete phrase has her jumping up and down and skipping circles around me. As a teacher I'm more and more convinced that memorizing lists of isolated words is a great waste of time and effort.
I feel like an archeologist, digging up vestiges of the German I learned in class 50 years ago. I'm amazed to find so many chards in fairly good condition. And I doubt very much that I could do the same in Spanish, although I only took one full year of German and three years of Spanish. My German teacher spoke to us only in German and tried to make it comprehensible. We did a lot of guessing because she translated nothing. I suppose, in 1963, that she was using the Natural Approach as it was then understood. My Spanish teacher rarely spoke in Spanish. We memorized vocabulary and grammar rules and translated.
My impression is that my subconscious stored the German which I acquired in a distant nook of my brain, so that I'm now able to excavate it, whereas the Spanish I learned, like dust and cobwebs, has long been blown away by the winds of time. Another difference between acquired language and learned language is that I remember my German classes with pleasure, with sufficient pleasure that I've often thought I would study it more some day, whereas I've never been tempted to use Spanish, even though I live only a few hours away from Spain, I spent part of my honeymoon in the Canary Islands and I have several friends who teach Spanish. When I hear spoken Spanish it's just noise. I have nothing to show for the three years I spent conjugating verbs. I had good marks in both classes, so it's not a question of being successful or not. I did what the Spanish teacher asked and passed her tests with A's. I did not acquire Spanish.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Framing students and sentence frames
Until recently most of my private students have been adults. And almost all the young people I had for lessons were actually studying English for the pleasure, not because they were in difficulty. One fourteen year old begged his mother for private lessons because "he was bored" at school. His English is already fluent, so doing grammar exercises and memorizing dialogs ......
In addition, I'm now giving lessons at a tutoring center. My new students are kids who are coming to me in hopes of improving their grades. Several of them have been told by their teacher that their English is catstrophic, that they are two or three years behind. I can't imagine talking to a student like that. And after meeting the students, I can assure you that I've see far worse in my career. Even if I thought a student was far below the expected level, I didn't tell him that. After all, the purpose of grades is to tell students and parents and the school administration what the student's level is. Why rub it in by making negative personal comments? I only made suggestions about what he could do to improve and I encouraged him whenever I saw progress.
The problem with telling students that they are weak and not meeting your expectations is that they may believe you and become convinced that "they're not good at languages". From then on, there's little you can do to help them progress because you have convinced them that they lack something essential and are beyond help. Of course, the teacher who denigrates her students has an easy out for their lack of improvement. The students' total ignorance of the fundamentals are the problem and she can not be held responsible for their failure. This is what I call "framing the students". We paint a picture of them that is so gloomy that no one can expect us to teach them anything. When worried parents come to plead, you point them to grammar books and lists of irregular verbs, knowing full well that even heroic efforts will make no difference. Of course, there are private lessons for those who have the means.
Today I met a girl who told me that although she had decent grades last year, this year, her fifth year of English, she is failing. Her teacher told her that she's at least two years behind the rest of the class. After talking to her a little, my impression is that her English is about average and she's very shy. Also very willing, since she came to me with two brand new grammar books with exercises that she had just bought at the book store. I suggested that she could try to return them and get her money back.
I explained that we would be talking more than writing and once she could understand without thinking about what I'm saying and answer without thinking as well, she would have no problem with grammar. She plays volleyball, so I compared it with seeing the ball coming in your direction. Do you think about how you're going to hit it, or do you just do it? Speaking a language should be the same way. She seemed to grasp what I was trying to say.
She said her teacher spoke in English almost all the time, but that she didn't understand much of what she said. I told her that I would be speaking in English, that was my job, but I would try to make it comprehensible. And her job, her only job, was to let me know when she didn't understand, so I could backtrack, repeat, speak more slowly, reword and translate if necessary. I explained that we would be talking more than writing and once she could understand without thinking about what I'm saying and answer without thinking as well, she would have no problem with grammar.
With my new students that I am meeting for the first time I have been using sentence frames, as developed by Robert Harrell on Ben Slavic's PLC. I gave them the sentence frames which are intended for use after the Christmas break.
I went to....
I saw ....
I got* ......
I ate ...
I played .....
So I asked my students where they went during the holiday. Who did they see? What did they see? What did they get for Christmas? What did they eat? What did they play? (All the girls played JustDance4 on their Play Station 3. All the boys played Call of Duty. ) I also told them where I had gone, what I had seen, what I had got, etc. Then I asked them to complete the above sentences in writing. We circled them once more then I asked them to add details, which we also circled.
The final step was to ask them to answer the questions again, but to lie this time. You should have seen their eyes light up at the idea that they could invent a holiday and use their imagination. I don't think I'm going to have any trouble getting them to buy into TPRS.
Sentence frames seem a good way to ease students who are used to traditional language teaching into PQA with the questions about their holiday and then into a story as we start to invent things for the fun of it. I wish I could have taken timed pictures of their faces as we gradually went from "stiff and prepared to suffer" to "puzzled" to "intrigued" to "really?" to "you must be joking!" to a wide grin and shining eyes. And we were speaking in English for more than 95% of the time. Is there any better formula for improvement than speaking in English and having fun?
*Robert used "I received" in German. For my French students this is a no brainer because "receive" and recevoir are transparent. I prefer to use "I got" because it's higher frequency in English, and an irregular verb and sounds more natural.
In addition, I'm now giving lessons at a tutoring center. My new students are kids who are coming to me in hopes of improving their grades. Several of them have been told by their teacher that their English is catstrophic, that they are two or three years behind. I can't imagine talking to a student like that. And after meeting the students, I can assure you that I've see far worse in my career. Even if I thought a student was far below the expected level, I didn't tell him that. After all, the purpose of grades is to tell students and parents and the school administration what the student's level is. Why rub it in by making negative personal comments? I only made suggestions about what he could do to improve and I encouraged him whenever I saw progress.
The problem with telling students that they are weak and not meeting your expectations is that they may believe you and become convinced that "they're not good at languages". From then on, there's little you can do to help them progress because you have convinced them that they lack something essential and are beyond help. Of course, the teacher who denigrates her students has an easy out for their lack of improvement. The students' total ignorance of the fundamentals are the problem and she can not be held responsible for their failure. This is what I call "framing the students". We paint a picture of them that is so gloomy that no one can expect us to teach them anything. When worried parents come to plead, you point them to grammar books and lists of irregular verbs, knowing full well that even heroic efforts will make no difference. Of course, there are private lessons for those who have the means.
Today I met a girl who told me that although she had decent grades last year, this year, her fifth year of English, she is failing. Her teacher told her that she's at least two years behind the rest of the class. After talking to her a little, my impression is that her English is about average and she's very shy. Also very willing, since she came to me with two brand new grammar books with exercises that she had just bought at the book store. I suggested that she could try to return them and get her money back.
I explained that we would be talking more than writing and once she could understand without thinking about what I'm saying and answer without thinking as well, she would have no problem with grammar. She plays volleyball, so I compared it with seeing the ball coming in your direction. Do you think about how you're going to hit it, or do you just do it? Speaking a language should be the same way. She seemed to grasp what I was trying to say.
She said her teacher spoke in English almost all the time, but that she didn't understand much of what she said. I told her that I would be speaking in English, that was my job, but I would try to make it comprehensible. And her job, her only job, was to let me know when she didn't understand, so I could backtrack, repeat, speak more slowly, reword and translate if necessary. I explained that we would be talking more than writing and once she could understand without thinking about what I'm saying and answer without thinking as well, she would have no problem with grammar.
With my new students that I am meeting for the first time I have been using sentence frames, as developed by Robert Harrell on Ben Slavic's PLC. I gave them the sentence frames which are intended for use after the Christmas break.
I went to....
I saw ....
I got* ......
I ate ...
I played .....
So I asked my students where they went during the holiday. Who did they see? What did they see? What did they get for Christmas? What did they eat? What did they play? (All the girls played JustDance4 on their Play Station 3. All the boys played Call of Duty. ) I also told them where I had gone, what I had seen, what I had got, etc. Then I asked them to complete the above sentences in writing. We circled them once more then I asked them to add details, which we also circled.
The final step was to ask them to answer the questions again, but to lie this time. You should have seen their eyes light up at the idea that they could invent a holiday and use their imagination. I don't think I'm going to have any trouble getting them to buy into TPRS.
Sentence frames seem a good way to ease students who are used to traditional language teaching into PQA with the questions about their holiday and then into a story as we start to invent things for the fun of it. I wish I could have taken timed pictures of their faces as we gradually went from "stiff and prepared to suffer" to "puzzled" to "intrigued" to "really?" to "you must be joking!" to a wide grin and shining eyes. And we were speaking in English for more than 95% of the time. Is there any better formula for improvement than speaking in English and having fun?
*Robert used "I received" in German. For my French students this is a no brainer because "receive" and recevoir are transparent. I prefer to use "I got" because it's higher frequency in English, and an irregular verb and sounds more natural.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
A High Honor
I know Michael Miller as a hearty fellow who handles a lot of the technical problems at National TPRS Conferences and is a jovial Master of Ceremonies during the Talent Night show. He's also a very talented teacher who wrote his own books to teach German using TPRS. Yesterday he published this on the moretprs forum. I think it shows that TPRS is not a cop out, just a way to keep the kids amused. It's a method which allows students and teachers to attain excellence.
Liebe Listler,
Today my school received a high honor: We are designated as an AATG German Center of Excellence. This honor is given to 4 high schools but only one K-8 school per year. As a Jr. High School, one could conclude we have the best pre-high school German program in the country. As I look at the comments from the judges, what really stood out for them is the curriculum. They were very interested in cutting edge methodology and TPRS is it. Sabine und Michael was created for the needs of our school, but many other schools find this curriculum to meet their needs as well.
Bottom line: TPRS works. My 8th graders score at the 61st percentile on national exams for sophomores in German 2 (we are technically in German 1). Stick with TPRS. It gets better all the time. I'll copy the panel's comments below.
Michael Miller
Dear Mr. Miller,
It is my great pleasure to inform you that Cheyenne Mountain Junior High
School's German program has been designated a German Center of Excellence
by the American Association of Teachers of German. After carefully
reviewing the applications of numerous K-12 German programs, the jurors
found Cheyenne Mountain Junior High School's programming excellent in
every category. Your program is the only junior high school programs to
receive this high distinction this year.
The jury was impressed in particular that the German program is so very
well established and growing. There is clear evidence that the program has
strong support from the administration, professional colleagues, alumni,
and students, and has strong ties to the wider campus and community.
Extracurricular activities and special events are clearly integral
elements of the program.
Furthermore, the selection panel noted the highly qualified staff with
credentials appropriate to the teaching assignment and an appropriate
faculty-student ratio. The application provided clear evidence of
continuing faculty development at local, state, and national levels. The
opportunity to collaborate and evidence of self-evaluation and shared
program goals are to be commended.
Most impressive is the program's curriculum. There is a clear, articulated
sequence of instructional programming that is standards-based and reflects
current methodologies. Outcomes at each instructional level are clearly
articulated and diverse learning styles are respected through varied
instructional and assessment techniques. The materials used in the program
are culturally authentic and interdisciplinary connections have been
established.
The German Program at Cheyenne Mountain Junior High School certainly
values its students. The jury noted that the teacher clearly values
student feedback and the application provided abundant evidence of the
good rapport you have with your students. This is truly a program that is
designed to meet the needs of students.
____________
Michael Miller
Sabine und Michael German TPRS materials
2418 Hagerman Street
Colorado Springs, CO 80904
Tel: 719-635-0017 FAX 719-785-5755
michael@sabineundmi
http://www.sabineun
Liebe Listler,
Today my school received a high honor: We are designated as an AATG German Center of Excellence. This honor is given to 4 high schools but only one K-8 school per year. As a Jr. High School, one could conclude we have the best pre-high school German program in the country. As I look at the comments from the judges, what really stood out for them is the curriculum. They were very interested in cutting edge methodology and TPRS is it. Sabine und Michael was created for the needs of our school, but many other schools find this curriculum to meet their needs as well.
Bottom line: TPRS works. My 8th graders score at the 61st percentile on national exams for sophomores in German 2 (we are technically in German 1). Stick with TPRS. It gets better all the time. I'll copy the panel's comments below.
Michael Miller
Dear Mr. Miller,
It is my great pleasure to inform you that Cheyenne Mountain Junior High
School's German program has been designated a German Center of Excellence
by the American Association of Teachers of German. After carefully
reviewing the applications of numerous K-12 German programs, the jurors
found Cheyenne Mountain Junior High School's programming excellent in
every category. Your program is the only junior high school programs to
receive this high distinction this year.
The jury was impressed in particular that the German program is so very
well established and growing. There is clear evidence that the program has
strong support from the administration, professional colleagues, alumni,
and students, and has strong ties to the wider campus and community.
Extracurricular activities and special events are clearly integral
elements of the program.
Furthermore, the selection panel noted the highly qualified staff with
credentials appropriate to the teaching assignment and an appropriate
faculty-student ratio. The application provided clear evidence of
continuing faculty development at local, state, and national levels. The
opportunity to collaborate and evidence of self-evaluation and shared
program goals are to be commended.
Most impressive is the program's curriculum. There is a clear, articulated
sequence of instructional programming that is standards-based and reflects
current methodologies. Outcomes at each instructional level are clearly
articulated and diverse learning styles are respected through varied
instructional and assessment techniques. The materials used in the program
are culturally authentic and interdisciplinary connections have been
established.
The German Program at Cheyenne Mountain Junior High School certainly
values its students. The jury noted that the teacher clearly values
student feedback and the application provided abundant evidence of the
good rapport you have with your students. This is truly a program that is
designed to meet the needs of students.
____________
Michael Miller
Sabine und Michael German TPRS materials
2418 Hagerman Street
Colorado Springs, CO 80904
Tel: 719-635-0017 FAX 719-785-5755
michael@sabineundmi
http://www.sabineun
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
TPRS Time
In the traditional textbooks there is always a chapter on telling time. An explanation followed by examples and very often clock faces even though today's children are more likely to have digital watches. How do we teach time with TPRS?
To begin, there is no chapter on telling time, just as there is no chapter on the weather, or clothes, or body parts or colors or sports or animals, etc. Putting all the vocabulary concerning a specific theme in one chapter insures that it will be forgotten as soon as the chapter test is over. Those who use TPRS introduce the vocabulary as it is needed for stories, just as children learn the words for hands, feet, dog, cats, raining, mittens, etc. as the need appears. A TPRS teacher will spread the vocabulary from one thematic chapter out over the entire year, teaching the more frequent words first and adding on the others as the opportunity comes.
It is very easy to teach time, even to young pupils. We simply ask when something happens. There is a boy. Where does he live? In Missouri, the students say. The boy who lives in Missouri sees a girl with green hair. When does he see the girl? In the morning or in the afternoon? In the morning.
Once the students have acquired morning and afternoon, we can introduce day and night. These are quickly and easily acquired as long as the teacher thinks to ask the question "When?" as often as possible. Then she can start asking for the time in hours. In her stories it is always one o'clock or six o'clock or eight o'clock. For the moment, the clocks in her stories have no minute hands.
Once her students are saying that the boy went to school at eight o'clock and the class finished at five o'clock without any hesitations, she can introduce half hours. When did the dog jump out of the window? At half past ten. At ten thirty. The two expressions can be presented at the same time as being equivalent. Students will immediately grasp ten thirty and recognize half past ten as meaning the same thing, if they hear the teacher saying both expressions, one after the other.
I've noticed that my traditionally taught French students often confuse "half past" and "a quarter past", simply because the expressions were taught in the same lesson at the same time, along with "a quarter to". So I can hear things like "half to five". And neither I nor the student know whether he means four thirty or five thirty. By being sure that "half past" is acquired, which means being used spontaneously, without thinking, before we introduce "a quarter past", we can avoid that confusion.
And I also hold off on "a quarter to", for the same reason. Let the concept of a quarter past the hour be solidly acquired before we introduce the idea of "a quarter to" the hour. Our patience and restraint will be generously rewarded, because once they have grasped the meaning of "a quarter to" we can easily introduce minutes and the rest is all downhill.
By introducing the expressions of time gradually, over the course of a year, we will insure that our students are able to tell the time accurately and will understand when they are told the time. In other words, when teaching expressions of time, it's necessary to take your time.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Can I teach myself German?
As I explained, one of my New Year's Resolutions was to listen to films in German and try to reactivate the German I learned in college fifty years ago.
Five days later, where am I at? I've listened to the first scene of The Green Mile with the German sound track and German subtitles at least seven or eight times. (I would prefer a film that was originally filmed in German, but not having one at hand, I've settled on what I had.)
My first impression is quite positive as I realize that I can understand more than I thought I would. Words that I would have been unable to translate if I had seen them listed out of context speak to me and I can understand what is being said. The subtitles help a lot and I would say that at this point I'm reading more than I'm listening. But I do hear the German words and I'm able to tell when the subtitles don't correspond to what is being spoken.
After about three sessions, I decided to write down the words I didn't understand and which seemed important. There are about nine of them. Then I realized that if they are high frequency, I'll come across them again. So I chose not to look them up in the dictionary. I will look them up the next time I encounter them.
A friend in Germany is sending me three German films with German subtitles. I'm to choose the one that I like best and we will occasionally talk on skype so that she can answer questions I may have. In the meantime, I'm going to continue with The Green Mile, but I've decided to watch the whole film without stopping and repeating every scene.
It seems to me that I'm not really translating from German to English, but getting a feel of the global meaning. Wie immer means "like always" and Wie finden sie das? means "How do you like this?" I'm not the least bit worried about knowing how to translate Wie, since I'm certain that I've understood what was being said.
Five days later, where am I at? I've listened to the first scene of The Green Mile with the German sound track and German subtitles at least seven or eight times. (I would prefer a film that was originally filmed in German, but not having one at hand, I've settled on what I had.)
My first impression is quite positive as I realize that I can understand more than I thought I would. Words that I would have been unable to translate if I had seen them listed out of context speak to me and I can understand what is being said. The subtitles help a lot and I would say that at this point I'm reading more than I'm listening. But I do hear the German words and I'm able to tell when the subtitles don't correspond to what is being spoken.
After about three sessions, I decided to write down the words I didn't understand and which seemed important. There are about nine of them. Then I realized that if they are high frequency, I'll come across them again. So I chose not to look them up in the dictionary. I will look them up the next time I encounter them.
A friend in Germany is sending me three German films with German subtitles. I'm to choose the one that I like best and we will occasionally talk on skype so that she can answer questions I may have. In the meantime, I'm going to continue with The Green Mile, but I've decided to watch the whole film without stopping and repeating every scene.
It seems to me that I'm not really translating from German to English, but getting a feel of the global meaning. Wie immer means "like always" and Wie finden sie das? means "How do you like this?" I'm not the least bit worried about knowing how to translate Wie, since I'm certain that I've understood what was being said.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
My New Year's Resolution
In 2013 I am going to ....
use Krashen's ideas to acquire some German. This will be a real test of comprehensible input because I don't have the time or means or will to take lessons from a teacher. If I could find a TPRS German teacher, maybe, but I also don't want the constraint of fixed times for lessons.
I studied German in college, mostly out of curiosity. I had already studied French, Spanish and Latin in high school and I even signed up for New Testament Greek. I happened on an excellent teacher who was using the Natural Approach, speaking only in German from day one. This put quite a few students off. They complained that they understood nothing of what she was saying. I enjoyed the challenge and did get quite a bit of comprehensible input because I was motivated enough to make the effort required to guess at what she was saying. After two semesters our final exam was oral. We had to go in and tell her a German fairy tale. I had chosen the one about a fischermann who lived in a vinegar jug. I passed with flying colors and was considering changing my major from French to German. But the following year the teacher accepted a better paying job in a bigger school and her replacement disappointed me. Whereas we had spoken only in German in the first year, our second year classes were mostly in English. The new teacher wasn't convinced we knew our declensions. After one semester I dropped out of the course with a B.
On a short trip through Austria and Bavaria in 1968 I realized I had lost most of my German and would have been totally unable to tell the story of the fischermann in a vinegar bottle, even if someone had wanted to listen to it. About ten years ago I sat in on German lessons in my lycée for a while, hoping to get some of it back. The teacher was a kind friend and did try to speak in German as much as possible, but also felt it was necessary to explain quite a bit of grammar. I was able to attend only one out of three classes, so most of the time I was trying to figure out what had gone on in the classes I had missed. But it was an interesting experience to be a student again, a student that was at a definite disadvantage. The following year my timetable made it impossible for me to attend any classes and the year after that my friend was assigned to a different school.
I think being able to speak and read and understand German (again) has been one of those goals I've had in the back of my mind for many years, like learning to ride. And you get to a point where you have to say, it's now or never. I went back to horse riding after a 25 break in 2005. I'm still learning, but today I can ride any reasonably well behaved horse. Recently on the moretprs forum someone who is not a teacher but has read up on Krashen's theories asked how he, as an adult, could learn Spanish, saying there were no TPRS teachers near him.
I replied that it's possible to learn a language through watching films with subtitles. One of my granddaughters became fluent in English after watching Pirates of the Caribbeans 27 times and High School Musical almost as much. I had a student whose English was so good that I assumed she had lived abroad. She told me no, but she had spent the summer watching her favorite series through streaming. Even as I sent off my somewhat glib reply to the forum, a little voice inside was saying, "Physician, cure thyself."
So this is my challenge for 2013. I'm going to watch German films in German with German subtitles. When I don't understand, I'll switch the subtitles to English and then go back to German. I'll watch the same scenes over and over, until I feel I've acquired the language. A German teacher on the forum suggested "Errands for Angels" as an interesting film that has German and English. I'm open to other suggestions, since I know next to nothing about the German film industry. I guess I could watch old Derrick shows, but they always put my husband to sleep.
Since I often advise my students to watch films in English, this will be a good test of how effective it is. And I'll keep you posted on how well Krashen's theories work out in the process.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Giving Private Lessons
A few years ago I refused to give private lessons. Partly because I felt I needed all my energy for my regular classes and partly because I suspected private lessons would be boring. For me and for the students.
Jokingly I said I was too much teacher for just one student. It takes a certain amount of energy to confront a classroom filled with adolescents and channel all their emotions into a group activity. A good lesson involves a lot of interaction between students and the teacher, but also between the students. It's a challenge that can become an exhilarating drug when it goes well. I couldn't imagine getting the same high from a private student.
Then life played one of its little jokes on me and the French Ministry of Education declared that they would kindly allow me to continue teaching to the age of 67, but then I would have to retire. If only I had had the forethought to lie about my age when I came to France, I would be getting a less miserly pension. Since last June I've started taking on private students in order to supplement my income, and also because I don't feel ready to stop teaching. I learn more from my students than they do from me and I'm convinced that every year I'm a better teacher than I was the year before. To suddenly stop teaching and take up golf seemed a tremendous waste of everything I've learned in the last twenty years.
My first students were friends that knew me, then I began getting calls from people who saw my ads. I now have about 30 students. The youngest is in primary school and the oldest are retired. Some are lycée students and some are adults who need English for their job or who want to be able to travel abroad. The work is as varied as their expectations and motivations, and I find it very interesting. I still miss the challenge of a class, but I have to admit that private lessons are much less stressful.
Recently a friend asked me for advice because she's been asked to give private lessons. I told her that I'm enjoying teaching with no discipline problems. Basically, I plan what I want to talk about with my students, much as I would with a class, but I don't worry if we get side-tracked on something that particularly interests them. It's personalization with a capital P. I'm using Anne Matava's scripts but we also work on songs, learning the vocabulary with lots of PQA, or films. Last week I gave two groups my recipe for a Christmas fruit cake.
I don't think that students have to have an advanced level to work with films. We watch a scene with the subtitles in English (my target language), then we talk about it. I tell stories, jokes, share my memories from growing up in the States or my life in Cameroon. Basically, I see myself as being paid to have a conversation with my students and I try to make it interesting, to be a good conversationalist.
Something that has worked very well is the graphic novel, "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. There are no words, but the pictures tell a complex and moving story. We look at each page, describe the images and then talk about what we think it means. It takes several lessons to work our way through the book and by then I have a good idea of where my students are at and where we can go next.
Basically, if we have faith in Krashen, we can ensure that our students will progress by simply chatting with them, verifying that they understand, translating when necessary so their affective filters stay down. Today with a group of adults we watched a scene from Shawshank Redemption in which one of the characters said, "He should have died in here." Spontaneously one of the students who would have tested as A2 last year translated the phrase "Il aurait du mourir ici." She did it without stopping to think and I was so proud of her.
I guess the extra, unexpected bonus with private lessons is that you come to know your students better than you can in a large classroom and they become your friends, people that you enjoy spending time with and look forward to seeing.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
How Do We Learn To Speak Another Language?
Stephen Krashen has been studying the question for almost his entire career. His research gave birth to "The Natural Approach", which seems to be the starting point for a multitude of modern communicative methods that encourage the student to "just get on with it" and seem to assume that the most essential quality needed by a language student is willingness to speak.
Of course that is an exaggeration and a caricature of many interesting and progressive methods. Just as Krashen's ideas are frequently reduced to a caricature. I heard one esteemed speaker call some of Krashen's proponents "the-talk-until-you-drop-school."
Those who advocate the "Natural Approach" assume that if a student hears enough language, he will be able to speak. But many seem to have forgotten or chosen to ignore what Krashen said about "comprehensible input". The teacher may very well speak in the target language 100% of the time, but if the students do not understand him, they are not receiving comprehensible input. A more careful reading of Krashen suggests that language is acquired through an interactive negotiation of meaning. The student has an important role to play, not by forcing himself to speak, but by signalling whenever he does not understand. Then the teacher must do whatever is necessary to make what she said comprehensible. I don't have the reference at hand, but I read many years ago about a study that showed that while students forget most of what they are told by the teacher, they almost always remember the answers to their own questions. So I like to wait for students to ask questions, knowing that there's a good chance they'll retain my answer.
In an ever recurring debate on the moretprs forum about how much grammar explanation students need, someone suggested that there is a middle ground between all tprs and all grammar and vocabulary lists. I replied that there was once a debate about whether or not the world was flat and that there could be no middle ground about it. If we believe that language is acquired through comprehensible input, we have to admit that grammar explanations in the native language are a waste of time and memorizing vocabulary lists in the short term memory are a waste of effort. The words just aren't where we need them when we need them.
Another teacher replied that adult learners can become very stressed when they are not given the grammatical explanations they crave, and that he thought there could be a balance between the two methods. He also thought that teaching the grammar can help reduce the number of repetitions needed before a structure can be acquired. This is my reply:
I'm afraid that when people say "middle ground" or "balance", they mean 50/50. I also have adult learners and mine are French, which means they went through the traditional learning process before it was called traditional because it was considered the only way to teach. Occasionally I give them the grammar they request in order to lower their affective filter. I'm able to do this in pop-ups and whenever they ask a direct question, I answer it. (Actually, I'm a reformed 4%er who used to pride herself on her "clear explanations" and loved linguistics, so I have to put on my grammar brake before their faces go green.) I insist on meaning more than grammatical labels. Very rarely, when I feel a certain level of frustration, I set aside an entire hour and I tell them, this is the only grammar lesson you are getting this year, so pay attention. And I draw a mandala with them as a graphic representation of the English verb system. They carefully note everything and label all the parts and some of them actually keep it and refer to it from time to time, but my real aim is to convince them that the English verb system is completely different from the French, that there is no future, conditional or subjunctive as such, just different ways of expressing the same ideas. So they will stop laboriously trying to find correspondences that don't exist.
I've noticed that after a while my adult students stop asking questions and start to relax and their expression improves. I've also noticed that it's very much a question of personalities. In one of my groups there's a couple that traveled around the world and lived in the States for a while, but never studied English in school. Obviously their English is acquired. Another woman studied German as her first foreign language, was a good student and could read an English text with a dictionary. Another woman is dyslexic, failed English in school but many years later had an exchange student live with her for a short while and discovered that she was the only person in the family that could communicate with her. There was only one that insisted on grammatical explanations. I'll let you guess which one. I gave them the one hour grammar lesson a year ago and they have never asked for more. They are now functioning as a fairly homogenous group and I can point out what would be considered advanced structures and they click immediately.
Of course there is a place for the monitor and that is in editing written work. We now have the very interesting possibility of putting a student's written text on a smartboard and editing it with the class, discussing what is acceptable, what is incomprehensible, etc. TPRS doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath. It means everything in its place. Just as we aim at 95% target language use in a class, but accept translations when they are the most efficient way to give meaning to a new word or expression, I think the "balance" between Comprehensible Input and grammatical explanations should be about the same. In TPRS grammar is called pop-ups and should last only a few seconds.
Of course that is an exaggeration and a caricature of many interesting and progressive methods. Just as Krashen's ideas are frequently reduced to a caricature. I heard one esteemed speaker call some of Krashen's proponents "the-talk-until-you-drop-school."
Those who advocate the "Natural Approach" assume that if a student hears enough language, he will be able to speak. But many seem to have forgotten or chosen to ignore what Krashen said about "comprehensible input". The teacher may very well speak in the target language 100% of the time, but if the students do not understand him, they are not receiving comprehensible input. A more careful reading of Krashen suggests that language is acquired through an interactive negotiation of meaning. The student has an important role to play, not by forcing himself to speak, but by signalling whenever he does not understand. Then the teacher must do whatever is necessary to make what she said comprehensible. I don't have the reference at hand, but I read many years ago about a study that showed that while students forget most of what they are told by the teacher, they almost always remember the answers to their own questions. So I like to wait for students to ask questions, knowing that there's a good chance they'll retain my answer.
In an ever recurring debate on the moretprs forum about how much grammar explanation students need, someone suggested that there is a middle ground between all tprs and all grammar and vocabulary lists. I replied that there was once a debate about whether or not the world was flat and that there could be no middle ground about it. If we believe that language is acquired through comprehensible input, we have to admit that grammar explanations in the native language are a waste of time and memorizing vocabulary lists in the short term memory are a waste of effort. The words just aren't where we need them when we need them.
Another teacher replied that adult learners can become very stressed when they are not given the grammatical explanations they crave, and that he thought there could be a balance between the two methods. He also thought that teaching the grammar can help reduce the number of repetitions needed before a structure can be acquired. This is my reply:
I'm afraid that when people say "middle ground" or "balance", they mean 50/50. I also have adult learners and mine are French, which means they went through the traditional learning process before it was called traditional because it was considered the only way to teach. Occasionally I give them the grammar they request in order to lower their affective filter. I'm able to do this in pop-ups and whenever they ask a direct question, I answer it. (Actually, I'm a reformed 4%er who used to pride herself on her "clear explanations" and loved linguistics, so I have to put on my grammar brake before their faces go green.) I insist on meaning more than grammatical labels. Very rarely, when I feel a certain level of frustration, I set aside an entire hour and I tell them, this is the only grammar lesson you are getting this year, so pay attention. And I draw a mandala with them as a graphic representation of the English verb system. They carefully note everything and label all the parts and some of them actually keep it and refer to it from time to time, but my real aim is to convince them that the English verb system is completely different from the French, that there is no future, conditional or subjunctive as such, just different ways of expressing the same ideas. So they will stop laboriously trying to find correspondences that don't exist.
I've noticed that after a while my adult students stop asking questions and start to relax and their expression improves. I've also noticed that it's very much a question of personalities. In one of my groups there's a couple that traveled around the world and lived in the States for a while, but never studied English in school. Obviously their English is acquired. Another woman studied German as her first foreign language, was a good student and could read an English text with a dictionary. Another woman is dyslexic, failed English in school but many years later had an exchange student live with her for a short while and discovered that she was the only person in the family that could communicate with her. There was only one that insisted on grammatical explanations. I'll let you guess which one. I gave them the one hour grammar lesson a year ago and they have never asked for more. They are now functioning as a fairly homogenous group and I can point out what would be considered advanced structures and they click immediately.
Of course there is a place for the monitor and that is in editing written work. We now have the very interesting possibility of putting a student's written text on a smartboard and editing it with the class, discussing what is acceptable, what is incomprehensible, etc. TPRS doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath. It means everything in its place. Just as we aim at 95% target language use in a class, but accept translations when they are the most efficient way to give meaning to a new word or expression, I think the "balance" between Comprehensible Input and grammatical explanations should be about the same. In TPRS grammar is called pop-ups and should last only a few seconds.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Teaching English in Cameroon
In 1967 I received a letter from the Peace Corps saying that I was accepted as a Volunteer trainee and assigned to teaching English in east Cameroon. I remember I had to look Cameroon up in the National Geographic collection of the Culver-Stockton library. I discovered that it was in the crook of Africa. (Some people, referring to the hot, sweltering climate, say armpit.) And that it had giant frogs. This was where I thought I would spend the next two years of my life. As it turned out, I spent seventeen years there before I moved on.
The Peace Corps training for our mission lasted three months. The first month was in Boston where we were given French lessons eight hours a day, five days a week. The lessons were designed for soldiers. You learned a dialog by heart and then you were drilled on it. It was repetitive, rapid-fire and mind numbing, but we were highly motivated and convinced this was the way to teach.
The second month was in Dartmouth, where we were given more French lessons, lectures about Cameroon, its history and social conditions and how to teach English as a foreign language. I have retained very little of those lectures except that I was envious of the people assigned to West Cameroon because they were being given lessons in Pidgin English. At one point I was told to teach English to a family from Cambodia. I was instructed not to use French and vaguely remember that they understood next to nothing of what I tried to teach them. From that experience I gained an immense respect for those who teach English to students with no common language.
For the third month we were sent to Quebec so we could practice our skills on French-speaking children. We were hosted by Canadian families as part of our immersion experience and I discovered that my Bachelor of Arts, French major, cum laude did not enable me to understand French Canadians. I remember very little about the lessons I gave or about my students, just that it all seemed very artificial. I was pretending to be a teacher and they were pretending to be pupils. I was speaking in English all the time and they were staring at me with bewildered looks. I was told that a teacher had to speak only in the target language, but no one told me that you also had to be comprehensible. I now know that history calls this "the Natural Approach".
Then we flew over the ocean and I eventually ended up in Kribi, Cameroon, a lovely little port on the Atlantic ocean. I was equipped with a bicycle to get to school, a thin, paperback textbook with dialogs, vocabulary lists and grammar exercises, a flannel blanket and cardboard cut out figures to illustrate the dialogs. Since many of the schools had no reliable source of electricity, we hung the flannel blanket on the wall and stuck the cardboard figures to it to help our students visualize the characters' actions.
So my career as a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages began. I had four classes, sixième, cinquième, quatrième and troisième. There were 60 twelve year olds in my sixième class. The next grade had only 45, there were less than 30 in my quatrième class and less than 20 in my troisième class. I later discovered that students who had reached the troisième were considered scholars and some actually taught part time in the local primary schools.
It was a wonderful way to begin teaching. Most green teachers are immediately confronted with discipline problems. My students desperately wanted to continue their studies, knowing that education made the difference between comfort, even luxury, and severe poverty. They wanted to learn English, the key to so many doors, especially in Cameroon where the two official languages are English and French, and they treated me with far more respect than I warranted. For many of them I was the first white woman they had ever actually spoken with.
I remember one day I was teaching the sixièmes when a big tropical storm broke out. The rain was coming down so hard that the noise on the tin roof drowned me out. It was coming through the windows, which had no glass, only chicken wire, so we had to close the shutters. There was one small naked light bulb, but the power was off because of the storm. So there I was, in the dark with sixty pupils who couldn't see me or hear me. Needless to say that I could see them even less because of their dark skins. I shouted at them to take out their notebooks and do exercise 4 in their books. There was not enough light to read by, but all sixty students took out their notebooks and pretended to do the exercise until the storm blew over and I could go on with my lesson.
With students like that, who needs to worry about teaching methods? ........ (to be continued )
The Peace Corps training for our mission lasted three months. The first month was in Boston where we were given French lessons eight hours a day, five days a week. The lessons were designed for soldiers. You learned a dialog by heart and then you were drilled on it. It was repetitive, rapid-fire and mind numbing, but we were highly motivated and convinced this was the way to teach.
The second month was in Dartmouth, where we were given more French lessons, lectures about Cameroon, its history and social conditions and how to teach English as a foreign language. I have retained very little of those lectures except that I was envious of the people assigned to West Cameroon because they were being given lessons in Pidgin English. At one point I was told to teach English to a family from Cambodia. I was instructed not to use French and vaguely remember that they understood next to nothing of what I tried to teach them. From that experience I gained an immense respect for those who teach English to students with no common language.
For the third month we were sent to Quebec so we could practice our skills on French-speaking children. We were hosted by Canadian families as part of our immersion experience and I discovered that my Bachelor of Arts, French major, cum laude did not enable me to understand French Canadians. I remember very little about the lessons I gave or about my students, just that it all seemed very artificial. I was pretending to be a teacher and they were pretending to be pupils. I was speaking in English all the time and they were staring at me with bewildered looks. I was told that a teacher had to speak only in the target language, but no one told me that you also had to be comprehensible. I now know that history calls this "the Natural Approach".
Then we flew over the ocean and I eventually ended up in Kribi, Cameroon, a lovely little port on the Atlantic ocean. I was equipped with a bicycle to get to school, a thin, paperback textbook with dialogs, vocabulary lists and grammar exercises, a flannel blanket and cardboard cut out figures to illustrate the dialogs. Since many of the schools had no reliable source of electricity, we hung the flannel blanket on the wall and stuck the cardboard figures to it to help our students visualize the characters' actions.
So my career as a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages began. I had four classes, sixième, cinquième, quatrième and troisième. There were 60 twelve year olds in my sixième class. The next grade had only 45, there were less than 30 in my quatrième class and less than 20 in my troisième class. I later discovered that students who had reached the troisième were considered scholars and some actually taught part time in the local primary schools.
It was a wonderful way to begin teaching. Most green teachers are immediately confronted with discipline problems. My students desperately wanted to continue their studies, knowing that education made the difference between comfort, even luxury, and severe poverty. They wanted to learn English, the key to so many doors, especially in Cameroon where the two official languages are English and French, and they treated me with far more respect than I warranted. For many of them I was the first white woman they had ever actually spoken with.
I remember one day I was teaching the sixièmes when a big tropical storm broke out. The rain was coming down so hard that the noise on the tin roof drowned me out. It was coming through the windows, which had no glass, only chicken wire, so we had to close the shutters. There was one small naked light bulb, but the power was off because of the storm. So there I was, in the dark with sixty pupils who couldn't see me or hear me. Needless to say that I could see them even less because of their dark skins. I shouted at them to take out their notebooks and do exercise 4 in their books. There was not enough light to read by, but all sixty students took out their notebooks and pretended to do the exercise until the storm blew over and I could go on with my lesson.
With students like that, who needs to worry about teaching methods? ........ (to be continued )
Thursday, December 20, 2012
A Visit from Saint Nicholas
The story behind the poem ....
When I was a little girl my mother bought Golden Books for me to read. They were square little books of twenty or thirty pages stapled with cardboard covers. And the one that I remember best was "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" with its illustrations of jolly Santa Claus putting gifts under the Christmas tree.
Later I read the poem to my younger brothers and sisters and later to my own children and grandchildren. Today I recited it to my students. Because by now I know it by heart. And through the years, I've learned that there's more to the poem than appears.
When the poem was written, probably in the late 18th century, Christmas was not the holiday we know. It was closer to our present celebration of New Year's Eve. Groups of tipsy "carolers" expected drinks in payment for their songs and in the larger cities would accost strangers and become menacing if they weren't offered their "Christmas cheer". This custom continued into the 19th century. I read an account of an early school in Schuyler County, Illinois where the boys asked their teacher for whiskey to celebrate Christmas. When he refused, they threw him out into the snow. Obviously they were big, husky farm lads. When the teacher complained to the town authorities, he was told it was the local custom and it would be better to comply.
The knickerbockers of New York, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, preferred to stay home and celebrate a quiet family holiday. Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, became an elf who came at night and put gifts and sweets in the children's stockings. And if we read the poem carefully, we can still see the "jolly old elf" who rides in "a miniature sleigh" with "eight tiny reindeer". In spite of the illustrations in my Golden Book, there is no mention of a Christmas tree in the poem.
A hundred years before the Coca-Cola advertizements, St. Nick was not dressed in red and white but in fur "from his head to his foot" and "his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot". Didn't you always wonder how the Santa we see could stay so clean while going up and down all those chimneys? A researcher has also pointed out that the Saint Nicholas in the poem has a working man's short pipe, "the stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth", whereas Haddon Sundblom, the artist who drew Santa for the Coca Cola company, showed him with a long curved pipe, like those smoked by wealthy New York burghers. Coca-Cola did not invent Santa, he was here a hundred years before the soda, but they re-looked him. The dirty little lower-class elf became a large, wealthy man who ran a toy factory where the elves worked for him.
Another little known fact about the poem is that it was not written by Clement C. Moore. It was originally published in a book by him, but he gave its author as "anonymous". When it became popular and everyone was reprinting it, his children insisted that he sign it. For twenty years he refused, saying he had not written it. He was annoyed that what he considered a trifle was drawing attention away from his more serious work. In fact, almost all of his poetry was gloomy and religious, bearing no ressemblance to the gay rhythm and heathen beliefs of "A Visit from Saint Nicholas." Before his death he finally agreed to acknowledge the poem as his own.
The children of Henry Livingston claimed that their father had written the poem for them and read it to them every Christmas, an entire generation before it was published. The original copy which they possessed was burned in a fire, but there are plenty of clues in the poem itself to support their claim. The first is the anapestic tetrameter of the poem, which Livingston often used for other poems and which Moore never used.
There is the fact that Livingston's wife slept with a kerchief on her head instead of the more usual night bonnet. There are the names of some of the reindeer which correspond to the names of some of Livingston's horses. His wife was from a Knickerbocker family and often said "Donner and Blitzen" as a mild cuss word. A maid who had worked for the Livingston's later became the nanny in Moore's household, so it is easy to see how he obtained the poem.
Of course, Livingston was not the last person to catch a glimpse of Saint Nicholas. When my children were small, we had a friend who was tall, had "a little round belly" and whose hair was "as white as the snow". We dressed him up as Santa Claus and told him to act like he was putting toys under the tree. He had strict orders not to talk because he had a pronounced accent from southwest France. I think Daniel and Joelle were three and four years old. We woke them up and let them peek around the door at him. He walked off, down the lane, and the children went back to bed, still half asleep. The next morning Daniel told us all about it and that he had seen Santa Claus fly off in his sleigh.
Today my grandson Elie is seven years old and still believes in Santa Claus. At school there are boys who say he doesn't exist, but Elie knows better because last year he slept on the terrace on Christmas Eve and remembers seeing Santa Claus fly past the windows. And this year, once again, I will recite "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" for my grandchildren, for my children and for myself, for all the wonderful memories it brings back to me.
When I was a little girl my mother bought Golden Books for me to read. They were square little books of twenty or thirty pages stapled with cardboard covers. And the one that I remember best was "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" with its illustrations of jolly Santa Claus putting gifts under the Christmas tree.
Later I read the poem to my younger brothers and sisters and later to my own children and grandchildren. Today I recited it to my students. Because by now I know it by heart. And through the years, I've learned that there's more to the poem than appears.
When the poem was written, probably in the late 18th century, Christmas was not the holiday we know. It was closer to our present celebration of New Year's Eve. Groups of tipsy "carolers" expected drinks in payment for their songs and in the larger cities would accost strangers and become menacing if they weren't offered their "Christmas cheer". This custom continued into the 19th century. I read an account of an early school in Schuyler County, Illinois where the boys asked their teacher for whiskey to celebrate Christmas. When he refused, they threw him out into the snow. Obviously they were big, husky farm lads. When the teacher complained to the town authorities, he was told it was the local custom and it would be better to comply.
The knickerbockers of New York, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, preferred to stay home and celebrate a quiet family holiday. Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, became an elf who came at night and put gifts and sweets in the children's stockings. And if we read the poem carefully, we can still see the "jolly old elf" who rides in "a miniature sleigh" with "eight tiny reindeer". In spite of the illustrations in my Golden Book, there is no mention of a Christmas tree in the poem.
A hundred years before the Coca-Cola advertizements, St. Nick was not dressed in red and white but in fur "from his head to his foot" and "his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot". Didn't you always wonder how the Santa we see could stay so clean while going up and down all those chimneys? A researcher has also pointed out that the Saint Nicholas in the poem has a working man's short pipe, "the stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth", whereas Haddon Sundblom, the artist who drew Santa for the Coca Cola company, showed him with a long curved pipe, like those smoked by wealthy New York burghers. Coca-Cola did not invent Santa, he was here a hundred years before the soda, but they re-looked him. The dirty little lower-class elf became a large, wealthy man who ran a toy factory where the elves worked for him.
Another little known fact about the poem is that it was not written by Clement C. Moore. It was originally published in a book by him, but he gave its author as "anonymous". When it became popular and everyone was reprinting it, his children insisted that he sign it. For twenty years he refused, saying he had not written it. He was annoyed that what he considered a trifle was drawing attention away from his more serious work. In fact, almost all of his poetry was gloomy and religious, bearing no ressemblance to the gay rhythm and heathen beliefs of "A Visit from Saint Nicholas." Before his death he finally agreed to acknowledge the poem as his own.
The children of Henry Livingston claimed that their father had written the poem for them and read it to them every Christmas, an entire generation before it was published. The original copy which they possessed was burned in a fire, but there are plenty of clues in the poem itself to support their claim. The first is the anapestic tetrameter of the poem, which Livingston often used for other poems and which Moore never used.
There is the fact that Livingston's wife slept with a kerchief on her head instead of the more usual night bonnet. There are the names of some of the reindeer which correspond to the names of some of Livingston's horses. His wife was from a Knickerbocker family and often said "Donner and Blitzen" as a mild cuss word. A maid who had worked for the Livingston's later became the nanny in Moore's household, so it is easy to see how he obtained the poem.
Of course, Livingston was not the last person to catch a glimpse of Saint Nicholas. When my children were small, we had a friend who was tall, had "a little round belly" and whose hair was "as white as the snow". We dressed him up as Santa Claus and told him to act like he was putting toys under the tree. He had strict orders not to talk because he had a pronounced accent from southwest France. I think Daniel and Joelle were three and four years old. We woke them up and let them peek around the door at him. He walked off, down the lane, and the children went back to bed, still half asleep. The next morning Daniel told us all about it and that he had seen Santa Claus fly off in his sleigh.
Today my grandson Elie is seven years old and still believes in Santa Claus. At school there are boys who say he doesn't exist, but Elie knows better because last year he slept on the terrace on Christmas Eve and remembers seeing Santa Claus fly past the windows. And this year, once again, I will recite "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" for my grandchildren, for my children and for myself, for all the wonderful memories it brings back to me.
A Visit from Saint Nicholas
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
And ma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!
"Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! on Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.
His eyes-how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose!
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
And ma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!
"Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! on Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.
His eyes-how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose!
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"
Monday, December 17, 2012
26 Acts of Kindness
How do you respond to senseless violence?
When I first heard about the killings in Newton, Connecticutt, I was, of course, appalled. I didn't want to know all the gruesome details, but it seemed almost impossible to escape hearing more than anyone would ever want to imagine. I worried that by giving it so much importance, we were preparing the way for another gunman in search of his day of ... infamy?
How do you respond? With sorrow and compassion for families that have lost their loved ones just when they were the most lovable? With grief for the lost potential of so many bright, happy lives? With anger? With bewilderment? My husband asked me why Americans, who proclaim their religious feelings so loudly, feel it necessary to be prepared to kill dozens if not hundreds of human beings in just a few minutes with an arsenal of automatic weapons. He thought Christ said to turn the other cheek.
Then I saw Nicholas Kristof's column. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-do-we-have-the-courage-to-stop-this.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
As he points out: "The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000.
We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?
On Facebook Nicholas directed readers to Anne Curry's page. She suggests that in memory of the victims people commit 26 acts of kindness. This spoke to me immediately because it's something I can do and it's something positive and loving in response to a meaningless act of hate. I can do it now, today, and I don't have to wait for an act of Congress. And perhaps, somewhere there is a child, a young person who is suffering and will be helped by one of those acts of kindness, helped to grow into a healthy, sane adult.
For behind this tragedy is another, the tragedy of a lost child that didn't get the help he needed, a child who learned to respond to hate and suffering with more hate and more suffering in an unending spiral of insane violence. And I remembered Elvis' wonderful song, "In the Ghetto."
"People, don't you understand? A child needs a helping hand. Or he's gonna be an angry young man."
So I hope you who are reading this will respond to the tragedy of Newton with your own 26 acts of kindness.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Ne prends pas la mouche.*
Graham Greene once said that France is the only country in the world where waiters and prostitutes don't hesitate to correct your grammar.
I have just finished reading John Baxter's "A Pound of Paper". He says, "One of the first things I'd learned about the French is that they correct your grammar. It's a national tic, like the way the Japanese bow. They even joke about it themselves. In Jean Renoir's movie, The Vanishing Corporal, Jean-Pierre Cassel is being helped to get out of a German prison camp by the local dentist's daughter. Even as she outlines his escape route, he corrects her French."
In a footnote he adds:
"There is also the joke about the English tourist in the French café.
Tourist: Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."
Waiter: M'sieu?
Tourist: In my soup. A fly. Un mouche.
Waiter: Une mouche, m'sieu. It's feminine.
Tourist (peering) : Blimey, you've got good eyesight.
*Ne prends pas la mouche = Literally, don't take the fly. It's an idiom which means "Don't get upset, don't be offended."
I have just finished reading John Baxter's "A Pound of Paper". He says, "One of the first things I'd learned about the French is that they correct your grammar. It's a national tic, like the way the Japanese bow. They even joke about it themselves. In Jean Renoir's movie, The Vanishing Corporal, Jean-Pierre Cassel is being helped to get out of a German prison camp by the local dentist's daughter. Even as she outlines his escape route, he corrects her French."
In a footnote he adds:
"There is also the joke about the English tourist in the French café.
Tourist: Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."
Waiter: M'sieu?
Tourist: In my soup. A fly. Un mouche.
Waiter: Une mouche, m'sieu. It's feminine.
Tourist (peering) : Blimey, you've got good eyesight.
*Ne prends pas la mouche = Literally, don't take the fly. It's an idiom which means "Don't get upset, don't be offended."
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Reading with TPRS
How
to read with students
Research,
intuition and experience agree that students who read extensively in their
second language acquire more vocabulary and better grammatical skills than
students who don’t read.
The problem is
getting them to read. Many teachers
assign reading as homework and expect their students to come to class prepared
to discuss the text that they read at home.
Students who can not answer questions about the passage have obviously
not done their homework. So the class
discussion is limited to those few who actually read and understood the assigned
passage. In the world of TPRS they are
called 4%ers, the estimated percentage of American high school students who
begin the study of a foreign language and carry through for four years.
Yet it is
apparent that for many students the assigned passage was mission
impossible. They have neither the skills
nor the confidence needed to wade their way through what appears to be a
totally incomprehensible text. Yes,
there are strategies that can help them guess at the meaning of words, but the
strategies depend on the existence of meaningful context. The experts say that for students to read
with pleasure and understanding, they must recognize at least nine out of ten
words. And discouraged students often
fail to recognize even familiar words through lack of contextual clues.
Reading is an
important element in the TPRS method.
The “R” of TPRS stands for Reading and it is the third and final step of
the three steps that Blaine Ray defined as TPRS. Reading texts that are at an
appropriate level furnishes the comprehensible input which is essential to
acquiring the language.
So how do we read with TPRS? First the
teacher must choose a text with care so that the unknown vocabulary is
limited. She can use a class story that
she has typed up, or a variant from another class or her own version. It’s also possible to start with the text and
backward plan the first two steps of TPRS to prepare the students to read it.
It may require two or three sessions of PQA and Story if the passage contains a
lot of new vocabulary. Low frequency vocabulary that is not essential to
comprehension can be eliminated or replaced with more common words.
If the passage
still seems daunting to students, the teacher may decide to make an embedded
reading out of it. She writes up a very
brief summary of the main points as the first version, then adds details to
obtain a second version and more details for a third version.
We read with
the students, translating the text orally. Since Reading is the final step, the
students have been hearing the new structures repeatedly since they were first presented and then circled throughout the PQA and Story step. The new
structures should look familiar by now and we can ask the class to do a choral
translation. Or let individual students
propose their translation. Whenever
there is a tricky word the teacher supplies it as soon as she sees her students
hesitate. She may or may not decide to
circle the problem structure depending on how useful she feels it is.
I used to
believe that I should be circling the target structures during the reading,
although this felt rather laborious, having circled them so often in the
preceding steps. I now know that there
are more interesting ways of getting in those added repetitions. Also, this required constant switching
between languages. Personally, if we are
going to translate, I prefer to save the questions in L2 for later.
Blaine Ray suggests
working on a parallel story by comparing a student to a character in the
story. This can be effective, but it
depends on the character’s situation which often is not comparable to a student’s. Or at least we hope not.
Jody, on Ben
Slavic’s Professional Learning Community, recently shared her method of further
exploiting the reading. After they have
translated a paragraph or more, she has a student sit at the front of the class,
pretending to be a character in the story and the other students interview
him. He is free to answer as he pleases,
so it becomes a kind of parallel story, but the student controls where he wants
to go with it. Jody stops it whenever she feels that it’s appropriate, giving a
good hand of applause to the student/character, and they either translate
another paragraph or she calls on another student to play a different character.
I think this is an excellent activity and will definitely be using it in the
future.
Susie Gross
explains that she often read novels with her students “lickety-split”. That is, as the end of the school year
approached, she would read an entire novel with her students. It would be a TPRS novel with limited
vocabulary and level appropriate. She
did no additional activities and she did not ask questions to test their
comprehension. She did nothing to
pre-teach new vocabulary. They simply
translated the entire novel, decoding it paragraph by paragraph for the
pleasure of the story. Susie anticipated
when they would not know a word and furnished it without letting the suspense
build up. In less than two weeks the students would have read an entire novel
and felt very proud of themselves. They
enjoyed reading “lickety-split” so much that one boy told her he didn’t like to
read in English, but he loved reading in French.
A follow-up
activity to a reading is the dictée. I’m
talking about the classical French dictée.
The teacher reads the text three times as the students write it
down. Ben Slavic explains this in detail
on his site. It’s a very good way to fix
those structures in the students’ minds once and for all.
So there are
several approaches to Reading in TPRS and the teacher can choose the one that
suits her and her class best.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Retelling the story
In a TPRS class the teacher can ask one of the students to retell the story.
Generally we do this after we have asked the story and the students have been hearing the targeted structures repeated over and over again. We never ask students to retell the story unless we are sure that they are ready. This is in line with the principle that you should not ask a student to do something unless you are sure that he will succeed in the task.
Retelling the story allows students to hear it one more time, giving them more comprehensible input and giving the big picture after having circled all the details. Often the teacher herself retells the story. She can pretend to have forgotten parts of the story, so the students fill in whenever she stops and looks puzzled. Or she can deliberately make mistakes that the students correct.
Asking students to retell the story allows the teacher to listen to their emergeant language and see which structures students are using easily, that is which have been acquired. Structures that don't appear in the retelling or which students struggle with will need more repetition.
Retelling is production, but it is sheltered production, since the student is asked to use language that he has heard repeated many times. It should give the student confidence in his ability to use the language and should never be a cause of stress.
There are several ways of retelling the story. If you have a few good, solid superstars, you can invite one of them to retell the story. Or let two of them tell the story as a team.
I have asked students to do a chain retell.* One student gives the first sentence of the retell, the next student repeats the first sentence and adds one. The third student repeats the first two sentences and adds one, and so on until the last student gives the complete summary of the story. This type of retell gives a maximum number of repetions. When the teacher smiles and encourages the students, they become braver and they can also help each other out when someone falters. It should be a group effort.
Some classes found retelling difficult to organize. I would then ask all the students to stand up and ask each student to say one sentence about the story, anything at all that they remembered, without worrying about where it might come in the order of events. I would call a student and he would propose his sentence. (If the grammar was not correct, I would echo the sentence back, as if I was repeating what he had said, but in a correct form.) I would then listen to the next student and decide which sentence came first in the events of the story and ask the two students to stand in that order and repeat their sentences. After hearing the third student, we would decide where he should stand. When all the students had proposed a sentence, they were basically standing in the right order for a retell and I would ask them to repeat their sentences in order. If we didn't agree about the order, we had to ask students to repeat their sentences again to decide who should come first. I found that this method worked well with the weaker classes where students lacked the confidence to attempt a retell on their own. In this manner the students had only to say their own sentence, but listening to the others they heard the necessary repetitions.
Retelling the story is also excellent preparation for reading the story.
* (Originally the chain retell was a getting-to-know-each-other game I used on the first day of school. When I had fewer than fifteen students I had them sit in a circle and I sat in the circle with them. Then I would ask the student next to me his name, where he was from, his favorite sport or activity, if he had a pet. Once I had the information I wanted, I asked the next student to tell us about the first and to introduce himself. The third student told about the first two and introduced himself. As we went around the circle, each student had to present all the others and himself, until we reached the last student who had to tell about everyone in the group. Of course the last person in the group was me, and the students would listen very attentively to see if I actually remembered their name.)
Generally we do this after we have asked the story and the students have been hearing the targeted structures repeated over and over again. We never ask students to retell the story unless we are sure that they are ready. This is in line with the principle that you should not ask a student to do something unless you are sure that he will succeed in the task.
Retelling the story allows students to hear it one more time, giving them more comprehensible input and giving the big picture after having circled all the details. Often the teacher herself retells the story. She can pretend to have forgotten parts of the story, so the students fill in whenever she stops and looks puzzled. Or she can deliberately make mistakes that the students correct.
Asking students to retell the story allows the teacher to listen to their emergeant language and see which structures students are using easily, that is which have been acquired. Structures that don't appear in the retelling or which students struggle with will need more repetition.
Retelling is production, but it is sheltered production, since the student is asked to use language that he has heard repeated many times. It should give the student confidence in his ability to use the language and should never be a cause of stress.
There are several ways of retelling the story. If you have a few good, solid superstars, you can invite one of them to retell the story. Or let two of them tell the story as a team.
I have asked students to do a chain retell.* One student gives the first sentence of the retell, the next student repeats the first sentence and adds one. The third student repeats the first two sentences and adds one, and so on until the last student gives the complete summary of the story. This type of retell gives a maximum number of repetions. When the teacher smiles and encourages the students, they become braver and they can also help each other out when someone falters. It should be a group effort.
Some classes found retelling difficult to organize. I would then ask all the students to stand up and ask each student to say one sentence about the story, anything at all that they remembered, without worrying about where it might come in the order of events. I would call a student and he would propose his sentence. (If the grammar was not correct, I would echo the sentence back, as if I was repeating what he had said, but in a correct form.) I would then listen to the next student and decide which sentence came first in the events of the story and ask the two students to stand in that order and repeat their sentences. After hearing the third student, we would decide where he should stand. When all the students had proposed a sentence, they were basically standing in the right order for a retell and I would ask them to repeat their sentences in order. If we didn't agree about the order, we had to ask students to repeat their sentences again to decide who should come first. I found that this method worked well with the weaker classes where students lacked the confidence to attempt a retell on their own. In this manner the students had only to say their own sentence, but listening to the others they heard the necessary repetitions.
Retelling the story is also excellent preparation for reading the story.
* (Originally the chain retell was a getting-to-know-each-other game I used on the first day of school. When I had fewer than fifteen students I had them sit in a circle and I sat in the circle with them. Then I would ask the student next to me his name, where he was from, his favorite sport or activity, if he had a pet. Once I had the information I wanted, I asked the next student to tell us about the first and to introduce himself. The third student told about the first two and introduced himself. As we went around the circle, each student had to present all the others and himself, until we reached the last student who had to tell about everyone in the group. Of course the last person in the group was me, and the students would listen very attentively to see if I actually remembered their name.)
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