Reading a film II

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Reading" a film

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

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

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

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

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

Horse-riding and Speaking a Foreign Language

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

What is TPRS?

Wikipedia says:

"TPR Storytelling (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling or TPRS) is a  method of teaching foreign languages. TPRS lessons use a mixture of reading and storytelling to help students learn a foreign language in a classroom setting. The method works in three steps: in step one the new vocabulary structures to be learned are taught using a combination of translation, gestures, and personalized questions; in step two those structures are used in a spoken class story; and finally, in step three, these same structures are used in a class reading. Throughout these three steps, the teacher will use a number of techniques to help make the target language comprehensible to the students, including careful limiting of vocabulary, constant asking of easy comprehension questions, frequent comprehension checks, and very short grammar explanations known as "pop-up grammar". Many teachers also assign additional reading activities such as free voluntary reading, and there have been several easy novels written by TPRS teachers for this purpose.

TPR Storytelling prioritizes the development of fluency over grammatical accuracy. Proponents of TPR Storytelling, basing their argument on the second language acquisition theories of Stephen Krashen, hold that the best way to help students develop both fluency and accuracy in a language is to expose them to large amounts of comprehensible input.  The different steps and techniques in TPR Storytelling help teachers to provide this input by making the language spoken in class both comprehensible and engaging. In addition, TPR Storytelling uses many concepts from mastery learning. Each lesson is focused on just three vocabulary phrases or fewer, enabling teachers to concentrate on teaching each phrase thoroughly. Teachers also make sure that the students internalize each phrase before moving on to new material, giving additional story lessons with the same vocabulary when necessary.

TPR Storytelling is unusual in that it is a grassroots movement among language teachers. After being developed by Blaine Ray in the 1990s, the method has gained popular appeal with language teachers who claim that they can reach more students and get better results than they could with previous methods.  However, so far it has seen little support from publishers or academic institutions. Teachers have instead published their own materials and teaching manuals, and training in TPR Storytelling is generally offered at workshops by existing TPRS teachers rather than at teacher training college."

^Comments: 

^{The three steps, according to Blaine Ray, are the essence of the method.}  

^{1) Presentation of a limited number of structures, usually one to three, using  images, gestures, TPR or even translation.  The teacher "circles" the structures by asking questions based on her first statement.  If the structure is likes she may say, "Georges likes chocolate.  Does Georges like chocolate or does Marie like chocolate? Does Georges like chocolate or does Georges detest chocolate? Does Georges like chocolate or does Georges like carrots?  Does George like carrots? Who likes chocolate?  What does George like?"  By talking about the students in the classroom, comparing their likes and dislikes, she makes the content real and interesting.  This is called PQA.  Personalized Questions and Answers.}

^{2) With the understanding that imagination and creativity are more compelling than factual truth, the teacher develops a story with the class, asking them to furnish the details.  She has a basic plot in mind.  The hero, usually a student in the class, has a problem.  He tries to solve it and fails.  He goes somewhere else and tries again and fails again.  He goes to a third location and solves the problem.  The repeated attempts allow repetition of the target structures, so that students are hearing them over and over again. The teacher selects suggestions from the student that are BEP ( Bizarre, Exaggerated, and Personalized), which help the students to remember the story.  She then asks the students to retell their story.}

^{3) The students read either their story or a different version using the same structures.  In reading, the students translate the text with help from the teacher, who will ask questions in the target language about each paragraph, checking for comprehension and sometimes developing a parallel story by comparing a student with the hero of the story.}

 ^"TPR Storytelling prioritizes the development of fluency over grammatical accuracy."

This statement is used by those who reject TPRS to claim that TPRS students don't know grammar or are very inaccurate in their use.  Actually, most TPRS students are quite accurate in their use of the structures they have been taught. Grammar is taught in what I call "homeopathic doses", or pop-ups.  In the example given above, after the students have been hearing "He likes... and "They like ..." the teacher may ask the student when they hear the final s and when it is missing. The reflection should not last more than a few seconds.  What is often not taken into account by those who prone giving more time to grammar instruction is the difference between learning and acquiring. Learning is done with our conscious, rational, analytical mind and goes into our short term memory.  Acquiring is unconscious, spontaneous and goes into our long term memory.  TPRS teachers are not interested in preparing students to do exercises on a worksheet.  They want their students to spontaneously produce correct language without thinking about it.

^"TPR Storytelling is unusual in that it is a grassroots movement among language teachers."

TPRS evolved and is still evolving through the interaction of language teachers on the internet, notably on the moretprs forum.  It has been tried and tested by each new user, and through their comments and experiences the method has improved.  Although Blaine Ray was a very dynamic teacher whose students found his stories about blue chimpanzees hilarious, teachers with different personalities are able to adapt the method to their style of teaching.  Personally, I am struck by the number of language teachers who have switched to this method after many years of apparent success with other techniques.  When I started trying to use the method, I saw my students retain what I was teaching, whereas before I had the impression that even good students erased everything we had studied once they had taken the test.  It is not easy to adapt and change decades of work habits, but it is often said that "Bad TPRS is better than no TPRS."  Krashen explains that as long as the students are getting comprehensible input they will acquire the language.  Although in the early years TPRS teachers were often isolated and confronted the hostility of more traditional teachers, today entire language departments have switched.  In general, enrollment figures go up when teachers begin using TPRS and many minor language programs have been saved because the teacher discovered TPRS and was able to attract more students to her courses.  Administrations who have recognized the positive effects of TPRS now tend to recruit teachers who use the method.

"So far it has seen little support from publishers or academic institutions."

A TPRS teacher does not need a textbook.  Her students don't do grammar exercises or worksheets and the comprehension questions are asked orally.  Every class develops its own, personalized story, so there is no need for a one-size fits all textbook story, which most students find boring.  Thus TPRS is not popular with publishers, although some have tried to adapt their material to the method.  Academic institutions  traditionally look down on grassroots movements and few of them have taken an unbiased look at the claims made by TPRS teachers.  The exception is Stephen Krashen who at first limited his support to saying that TPRS produced Comprehensible Input, and is now an active participant on the moretprs forum.