OK, this is intended to be very, very gentle, but after seeing a number of conventionally excellent — and yet very “not really highest possible quality input based” — review suggestions out there of late:
The whole point behind TPRS is that review is redundant. We teach to mastery the first time around. I think this “old-time” tenet of TPRS has been getting lost a bit lately. There is so much emphasis on “keeping it fresh” and “keeping students interested” that I think a lot of teachers are jumping to new content in an effort to do that, instead of working the old content in different ways until it’s really firm.
How many of us use a reading more than once with the kids? Use different modalities of reading to get that repetition in reading? Do you know multiple different ways to have kids read a text? How many retell stories after the first day the story was created? How many have a plan to spiral vocabulary throughout the year? How high frequency is the language you are choosing, really? High frequency enough that it’s almost unnecessary to plan for repetition?
Really, in my view, TPRS students should be rolling their eyes and complaining about having to review a vocabulary list, saying that “we know all of these already”.
Our challenge as TPRS teachers — and part of the reason why I am so supportive of planned input rather than free-range — is that we provide **enough** repetitions for the required content of our class, however many that number happens to be for our particular students. That doesn’t mean we do 675 repetitions of a phrase in the first class and then never utter it again until the final exam and trust that it was acquired. Rather, we do 100 reps the first class, get in another 30 reps through a reading, another 50 through discussing the reading, and then constantly recycle that language in coming classes.
This is why people use (well-designed) TPRS textbooks — they recycle or “spiral” that language without the classroom teacher having to think about it.
Being at a point where review IS required while doing TPRS doesn’t mean one is a horrible teacher. It just means, in my view, that it might be a good thing to put more focus on repetition, both within-sessions and across-sessions. There are a lot of separate skills in TPRS, and curriculum design is not generally covered in workshops. Implementation, yes, but not design, and that’s what this has to do with, to a great degree.
Across-session repetition is really important, and helps not only because it’s repetition across time, but more so (IMO) because what could be more unexpected context than hearing something you had no idea at all was going to be said, since it “has nothing to do” with today’s lesson (but yet it has everything to do with it, since we deliberately choose such high-frequency vocabulary and structures).
It’s possible that having kids “review” in pairs or groups might be a way to give a nod to an admin who insists on seeing pairwork, without harming input — assuming that the review truly is unnecessary in the first place, so that the kids are giving each other input of reasonable quality. There’s always some use for things that are not properly part of TPRS practice (in a very rigorous sense) because we do not teach in a perfect TPRS-friendly world. But if that review is really needed — it was needed two months back, when those items were originally introduced, and over all the intervening time. Like everything else in TPRS, “review” is mixed into the blend in such fine pieces as to be invisible, like “differentiation” and “grammar instruction” and “interpersonal and presentational and interpretive language” and so on. They’re all there. It just looks a lot different from a non-TPRS classroom.
*applause*
Successfully gentle and to the point. I would ask you to clarify, though, what you mean by “content” in the second paragraph. Do you mean new structures, or do you mean new stories/readings/etc that target the same structures, or either? I think that keeping things fresh in the interest of engaging students becomes a detractor when the teacher moves on to new STRUCTURES before students have had sufficient repetitions and when the teacher does not purposefully structure his/her curriculum to recycle previously targeted structures (the latter was my huge mistake in my first 1.5 years of TPRS). If you mean that even moving on to new stories/readings/other activities that target the same structures before students have really worked and re-worked and re-worked again the current story/reading/etc, please share your thoughts behind that!
I mean the information or storyline in the input (whether spoken or written), NOT the targeted language or structure. The whole idea is to repeat the same language and structures to the point of acquisition. There’s no issue with using a different story that targets the same language, but in Chinese (my focus area) there is rarely a case where there are multiple versions of stories available. The teacher must then either be writing stories for every class (and remember Chinese teachers often work solo and have five preps, or travel) or must use other techniques to get more mileage out of existing stories or texts.
Concerning a spiraling curriculum, I am not so sure that even a well-designed TPRS textbook is sufficient. Earlier this year I wrote about how I modify my circling so that I work in a lot of extremely high-frequency verbs everyday, whenever I am storyasking (https://mrpeto.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/the-advantage-of-posting-high-frequency-verbs). I feel like the spiraling has to be that frequent: every day. If I were waiting for a textbook to bring something back, well, that would either be a huge textbook composed of copious margin notes, or the pre-planned spiraling just would not be frequent enough. There is no need to cover curriculum design in beginner workshops. Recycling is an essential skill, easily managed by posting key high-frequency structures for the teacher to use while storyasking.
Of course we do not cover curriculum design in beginning TPRS workshops, but I think beginning TPRS teachers do need to know how to evaluate a curriclum or set of materials. This is particularly true of Chinese teachers, for whom there are very few pre-made sets of materials available, and even fewer that are specifically TPRS friendly. As I said in the post, if the things selected for input are high frequency enough, they will naturally be repeated daily and no review of any kind should be necessary with just a little attention from the teacher.
I recently met with a group of students, the ones who were the fastest acquirers, to talk about their experience in class. They had a lot of interesting things to say, but they all commented that the repetition felt overdone and that they lost interest because of repetition of the stories. This troubled me because I did not feel that they had reached true mastery, or that their output was consistently accurate, and also the slower acquirers in the classes were not getting near enough repetition before I was losing these faster kids. I also had a really different experience…I felt like I was moving forward much too fast. I feel hope in your comment that they SHOULD be complaining…but what do you think is my responsibility for their fading involvement?
Tough love answer? Up your game.
If the repetition feels overdone, it’s because you are, well, “repeating”. You can’t repeat. You need to provide repetition in the context and guise of meaning. So you may need to do multiple stories, slightly different, perhaps with a new item in each, so that the “feeling” is not of the same thing being pounded over and over. Yes, you’re still saying “il faut que…” over and over, but since the focus is on the meaning, not the form or the words, it needs to be done in a way that makes the students think about and focus on the interesting content that is being talked about, not on just mechanically answering questions.
Check if the kids are able to anticipate your questions. Circling needs to be truly randomized, and good story-askers don’t just circle a single sentence — they circle several at once, and intersperse comprehension checks, “how would you say”s, pop-ups on grammar, pronunciation, culture, or whatever, parallel stories, in-jokes. It’s like juggling ping-pong balls. Every individual one is easy to keep going, but it’s not easy to keep them all in the air.
TPRS done well is not simply stating a sentence, circling it, and going on to the next sentence by asking for a detail. That’s how we start to train people. But to be comfortable and unpredictable and, well, interesting, takes a lot of practice beyond that. Remember that all those magical demos are just that — demos. They’re half-hour stories without accountability that work well because they’ve been done millions of times. For a classroom situation with processors of varying speeds, you need to provide overlapped repetition rather than thinking you do a story and “they’ve got it” if there was enough repetition. And the longer you go on with a group, the more “space” there is between where kids are at, like a pack of racehorses spreading out as the race goes on.
I would focus on doing more “pieces” of input (separate stories, episodes, readings, etc.) and try to get reps of the things the slower processors are missing over time, while looking hard at your own practice and trying to figure out whether it’s predictable, coming from you instead of them, or just a little monotonous. This time of year, that’s hard to avoid! 😉
Thanks for the great advice, I’m not sure how to implement it but maybe I’ll understand it better in 3 or 5 years. I feel like I’m doing the things you suggest to the best of my ability, so maybe I just need more practice. I definitely struggle with this racehorse phenomenon of the space between their skills widening. So, do you not follow up stories with t/f, questions, storyboards and retells, and other forms of retells of the same story? Are you suggesting a new story every day?
I usually do ONE of the follow-ups (t/f, questions, storyboards, retells) but not all of them on the same story. I guess I’m an easily bored person myself, maybe that’s why? But it does seem to help with keeping kids’ interest. Just as they can’t predict what circling question will come next, they can’t predict exactly how we’ll deal with a story after it’s asked. I’m also reading between stories using the same language in a short (different) reading; the “big reading” of the novel comes at the end of the year (for 1st year).
This is super interesting and helpful, thank you. I do a combination of asked stories, Movie Talks, and stories that I create for the students, sometimes based on things that they tell me during PQA. I also do a “warmup reading” each day (we’re on a 75-minute block) which is a little story projected on a slide that recycles structures. We translate it together and follow that up with TL questions and PQA. Because of behavior management issues, I have faded out of asking stories as much, but I want to get back to it. When you ask a story, are you using scripts?
Angie, I’m not using scripts, but we do train people to ask stories with what we call a “five-line” (there aren’t really always five lines, so that’s a stupid name, but it’s just habit to call it that now…) A “five-line” is just a simple skeleton with all blanks where the specifics should be, so the kids supply who and what and where and so on. Most of the time, the language I’m focusing on includes a verb (usually verb-object, but not always) so this works fine (and in the beginning, it’s almost always so).
When I’m doing stories, I focus on only one target structure or item, and I make sure to put that BEFORE or as the problem, so I get lots of reps for sure. So I don’t script, but I am a bit obsessive about keeping track (mentally) of the vocabulary the kids have had so far, plus I write all my own readings which reinforces that, so I don’t need to write a script to make sure I “hit” all the vocab I want to recycle. It’s a useful thing to do if one is unclear on precisely what vocab has been done, though. But any script is always VERY vague and totally without specifics — otherwise I’m telling a story, not asking it. We’ve found that even the “funniest” endings often fall flat because they’re not coming from the kids — something I try to keep in mind (but sometimes fail!)
Thanks so much, this is really useful information.