Using my Dutch

I’m visiting with Dutch relatives and naturally thinking about language use and comprehensibility.

I spoke Dutch for about a year when I was five, and then used it again for a summer when I was ten. I’ve had occasional exposure to it since, and started reading when Alike (see right sidebar) gave me some children’s reading last summer, but haven’t really tried to keep it up.

What saves me in conversations is first that I know all the “little” words. But, also, for, from, is, was, all, of, there, then, always, not, no, yes… all these and who knows how many more are not even a question for my brain. It makes me think that I need to make sure that my kids know these words especially well. More about that in a moment. Then the next thing is all the cognates. There are a lot of them in Dutch for an English speaker. And finally, since I am writing this as my cousin shows his mother pictures of his trip to Turkey, I am again astounded by how much the visual helps with context. She is asking questions, and he is answering them. I could do that in class with a native speaker.

Back to those little words. There is a reading site that I’ve kind of lost track of. Valerie Thornbur (Thornber?) explains that most of French can be comprehensible with only 12 little words, and she is right. She has pictures and three levels of reading on her site, which basically is the same thing as Embedded Reading, but she is concentrating on it as continuing to use those little words. I like them also as sight words; kids need to be able to read them in Cyrillic instantly as well as being able to understand them instantly. I think that I might do well to go back to my “sight words” list at the beginning of the year again.

I may be on vacation, but I am missing my TPRS community!

Multilevel classes

Haiyun asked me to Skype on the topic of Mixed classes. I thought it could be a post rather than a comment, so that we could find it again.

I do teach multilevel classes, and I would be glad to Skype with you, but it might take until I am on the other side of a trip I’m about to leave on. Therefore I’m going to answer here with just a few of the main ideas that I have (that might be all there is to give you!).

For me, the level 1 + others is the hardest mix in multilevel classes, because you have kids who don’t know anything, and the kids who know a lot are a bit frustrated, or they are at least irritated because they want to be moving faster. But I continue to tell them that going slower is better for them, and I ask them to do the telling from perspective and get them to be the actors.

The first thing is to establish the classroom practices very firmly. I really like what someone here does…maybe it’s Jody?…and everyone in class gestures the same if someone doesn’t understand. It makes a class bond. I have to admit that I didn’t get it exactly right because I never insisted on it, but it was fun when it happened. Practice in the first days would clear up that problem. Blurting can become a problem because those year 2 kids want so much to show off. You have to give them other ways to do it that are appropriate for the class and that won’t intimidate the new kids. (I mean especially “blurting” in the target language. You would never think that would be a problem!) It’s important for the teacher to also review practices: go slower than you think you need to, point and pause at new structures, and keep good eye contact going with the new kids as well as the old kids. Discipline on both sides–teacher and students–is critical. Spend as long as you need practicing all the routines that make it possible for the group to acquire language and not be interrupted by behaviors, misunderstanding, or classroom transitions and drop-in interruptions. Structure in the classroom as far as policies will give you the freedom to teach so that students will acquire language. (Laurie has a great post on this topic.)

The second idea is to use TPR on five or so of your “old” verbs a day, and use that as the opening activity. Then you can do little mini stories with those words and have the whole class act them out. I do that anyway at the beginning of the year, but this time, you’re not going to use those “old” verbs too much in stories, because the new kids haven’t truly acquired them. Basically I tried to insert only one at a time into the stories for the new kids. It’s a challenge. The first two are “says” and “goes” for me. If you have been doing TPR, you have a gesture that they’ve been practicing, and that will help the new kids understand.

Third, start with structures that are new for the year 2 kids. This will help with the intimidation factor. (I actually went to the same list that the intermediate and advanced kids were using; my kids always share information, and I knew that they would talk about it.) Don’t mention this if you don’t have to; the year 1 kids will not know the difference, while the year 2 kids will figure it out and be mollified. Slowly, slowly add in the structures that you’d been doing before, but really limit the vocabulary. It’s hard, because you’ll want to move faster with the old kids. What you can do is ask them to work separately from the whole group; while you do a retell of the story with the year 1 group, you can ask kids in year 2 to add in details and expect them to use some of the “old” structures. You won’t be asking the year 1 kids for retells as soon.

What’s hardest for me in a mixed class is the reading puzzle. Obviously you can write up the new stories. With a non-Roman alphabet, there are kids who are way ahead of the new ones, but the year 2 kids aren’t really strong enough to be reading on their own. I did a variety of things in mixed pairs and groups to figure out who the best teachers were to get the alphabet going and later the mini class stories, and I used my native speaker to lead the strongest year 2 kids so that they could read ahead of us. It was a bit of a mess, because then I wanted us back together at the end of the year this year. Still, there was really only one student who didn’t really get it, and I think it was more because he skipped a lot of classes in the first month because the TPRS class demanded his attention “too much.”

That is all I really know about teaching multilevel classes that have a big level 1 component. Usually my other classes have just one or two level 1 kids, and I pair them up with a kind experienced student, telling them that they have to let us know every time they don’t understand, and that it will be really uncomfortable for the first month. Those kids are self-selected, and they want to learn faster, so they usually do. One of my first-year kids in the intermediate class this year got the highest score of all on the written final, and her oral presentation was among the best.

It’s not easy, and you can’t let your administration think it’s easy. If they can get you extra resources, like a native speaker, get them! Let them know that you are doing something that is unusual, and get all the appreciation out of them that you can, meanwhile knowing that even though it’s harder, every class has a range of abilities after the first week or two. Parents deal with multilevel language teaching all the time. They just vary their vocabulary and their question types. How many times does a mom hold out two outfits for a toddler and say, “Do you want the blue pants or the yellow pants?” The child points. Meanwhile, she’s calling to the older one and telling him to put on his red pants because they’re warmer and it’s cold outside. The little secret I don’t admit to my administration when I am taking on this admittedly difficult chore of mixed classes is that students will actually learn more by being in a mixed class, as long as I’m doing comprehensible, compelling, repetitive input.

Let me know if that gives you enough ideas to go on!

Finished! And thank you.

Hello. Nathan here.  It’s been so long since I’ve posted or even commented on anything that I need to almost reintroduce myself, and I definitely have a bunch of back reading to do on the blogs again.  But I’m back because I’m finally finished; my dissertation is done and was turned in today.  It ended up running 247 pages, and pretty much took the best part of this year to write.

In the final writing stages I had to banish myself from the blog circuit entirely because it’s literally impossible for me to “just read one” topic and before I know it there goes my afternoon.  Now I can rejoin the world of the living–at admittedly a fairly dead time as school is just wrapping up here and already done elsewhere.

As my research I wrote about the TPRS world and how teacher develop through working together, and I really need to express my thanks to the entire TPRS community that is among the most caring, innovative and supportive I’ve known anywhere.  Many thanks to the teachers I have worked with, and I’m looking forward to meeting others as we roll along. So a heartfelt thanks to the community that MJ has nurtured here and the larger TPRS community we’re embedded in.

Embedded Reading tweak

Yesterday in the first day of a workshop with the wonderful Cherise Montgomery, I watched a culturally-based power point that gave me yet another way to think about embedded readings.

Cherise started by telling the name of an artist and showing a picture of him. On the next slide, she showed a picture, asked his name, and added that he liked to paint. (All the words she used were also written on the slide.) 

In the next one, she asked his name, confirmed his name and what he liked to do, and explained that he liked to paint murals. And so on. The text kept growing.

Then she introduced a new artist and used the same kind of information, but added a painting of a girl. It turned out that the girl was sad. Why was she sad? We tried to figure it out. 

The next slide was another artist, who liked to paint yet other kinds of paintings, but it turned out that he was a friend of the girl in the picture, and she was no longer sad because she had a friend. 

This whole thing was beautifully thought out, and had lots of circling. The only thing it didn’t have was the TPRS personalization piece, but that would be easy to bring in, if you did comparisons.

I’m sorry that I couldn’t continue for the whole week with Cherise. Life sometimes interferes with plans. I’m just hoping that Betsy and Cara will take really good notes and share with me. Hey! Cara! If you get this, will you please let me post notes? 

Universal stories

A Ted talk that Ben posted from Grant got me thinking about universal stories again. This blog has a list of seven.

I’m thinking about this because it seems like most of the stories my classes and I tell are of the “quest” variety (and sometimes the comedy): the character needs something and goes out after it. It might be fun to think in terms of varying the story type from time to time.

Bill Harley talks about how we need to choose stories to fit our audience. I had one student this year whose reflections kept coming back to his father’s accident, no matter what story we told. Those reflections were thanks to Bryce’s suggestions, always in English, and they helped me understand and appreciate the student on a whole different level. I want to keep in my mind the startling idea that we help ourselves make sense of our world when we tell a story.

Maybe we could even share the “universal story” scheme with students. It might help the 4%-ers more accepting of the TPRS techniques.

On vocabulary lists

I was just adding one more word to my “First 200″ list. It’s still a little out of order, in that words that seem like they should be really solid (because, then, who, why) are way down the list. With time, I’ll figure out whether I should just take those off or whether it will be good to make sure that kids know them in every circumstance. And maybe…the “why/because” combination can stay down there, because kids are not really ready to use them at length until their proficiency is higher than first-year, and then I will be reminded to really focus on getting kids to ask those questions.

Commenting on the specific list is not what I want to do right now. I wanted to say that I am happy with how I used it this year, for the most part. This comment goes back to a conversation I had with Diana Noonan about three years ago now, one that I’ve probably reported a number of times, but it might explain my approach. I was asking Diana about her Denver list of 200 words for Spanish and French classes (search here for “Denver public schools word lists”). If those were for the first two years, what were her lists for the second two years? She said that it would be the same list, just with more complications.

So this is what I’ve done with my list: I am using 25 structures per quarter. First year kids get the first 100. Those are so basic that they come up all the time. In the next three years (I have mixed classes from then on), we rotate, 25 structures at a time, through the entire 200. It will mean that at some point the Russian 1 and Russian 4 will be on the same structures. But the advanced kids will be dealing with the verbs in all tenses and modes, and the nouns in all cases, or at least the ones I want to focus on. And if a “little word” is on the list, I’ll make sure that I use it with a variety of expressions to give the kids the full sense of its use. That, in combination with a slow pace of Scaffolding Literacy, embedded readings and lots of verbal and written CI, should make things flow.

I still do backward planning with specific additional vocabulary that goes with certain readings, but this year following the list gave me some necessary structure, as well as letting the kids know what they were responsible for more clearly than I had done in the past. One of my level 3 turned in a make-up story the other day using almost all the structures from this quarter, and I nearly hugged her, looking at how correctly she used most of them (grammatically) in context. I was on the point of asking her whether she’d had Russian-student assistance, and then I noticed that the structures we’d used only in one case or tense were sometimes incorrect. She couldn’t manipulate what she hadn’t heard a lot as successfully.

I’m feeling pretty good about what I learned as I taught this year, even as I see all the places I could have improved. I’m so looking forward to next year, but first…I’m looking forward to this summer and creating the time to get outside in the garden, on the lake, into the woods, and onto the hills. Hurrah!

Scaffolding Literacy results

I teach both English and Russian. I’ve been experimenting with SL in both disciplines.

In contrast to previous terms, this semester I didn’t work on teaching my English students how to write an essay over the five months. Instead, we did the SL series all the way through to writing plans several times. We talked a lot about author’s intent in fiction and non-fiction alike. We looked at how vocabulary choices and word placement change meaning.

At the last moment, I shared essay form with them. We discussed how what we’ve read follows it. I told them that we were going to compress the process into just five paragraphs, but that essays don’t always have to be that long or that short.

It was the first time in my life that an entire group of ninth-graders turned out first drafts of essays that were essentially perfect form with details that supported the paragraphs appropriately. For the final, they had to look over my rubric suggestions and make corrections, but in other years I would have been happy with final drafts that looked like what these kids gave me for the first time.

I think the same is true of my advanced kids in Russian. Unfortunately I didn’t have quite the same experimental design…that is, with the English students, I’d always practiced essays and labored over them, and we’d never done SL. It’s a little easier to pick apart. Practicing form based on good writing and then following up on it seems to have enormously better results than battling with form that you don’t understand and trying to make it make sense.

One thing is clear; it’s amazing how well that advanced group is reading, and while I haven’t had them doing much speaking or writing (relative to other years), their oral finals were a joy to listen to and the written ones are equally wonderful. They’re filled with detailed writing that I have never seen kids reproduce so well before–the connector words, the little words that add fluency but that are so hard to teach. There’s a much better sense of sentence, if that makes sense.

I can’t prove it, but I think that their increased ability in writing is also due to the SL practice. They commented that it makes them understand grammar without my teaching it. I didn’t respond that I am always teaching grammar, but they aren’t aware of it so much.

Can’t wait to share this with some folks at the conferences this year. I was never able to share it with my local folks because we had politics take over our recent meetings. Maybe I could do it over Skype or something with a couple of interested people to practice. I’m not very good at knowing how long presentations take me with real people.

Beginners are now intermediates/thinking ahead

It’s bittersweet to end the year with my beginners. They are so far ahead of where they were, either in August or January, and yet there is so much more for them to learn. I hope that they will all come back to me to continue their study. Thanks to the TPRS/CI focus, the best of the group understand much more than I did, even after a couple of years of college. They can pretty much use what they know.

I feel a bit worried about a couple who didn’t truly learn to read well. They both have learning challenges, but I still contend that a lot of it is that they have never learned how to focus in class. I helped them somewhat, but I haven’t brought them over completely. In a TPRS class, students can’t just zone out and expect to catch up later. Some complain that they don’t get “off” time during the class. I suppose that’s true. I try to mix things up and give them brain breaks, and what I really need is an ADD adult to come and hang out to let me know how I’m doing on the brain breaks. In my adult classes, we can go for a longer period than we can in the high school classes, but there are many reasons for that, starting with motivation and ending with maturity. Besides, adults can skip a night if they need to. They are just very clear that they need to ask more questions the next time.

Goals for next year: keep streamlining the assessment piece. Figure out more and better ways to let the Smartboard work for me. Lay out some ideas for a virtual move to Moscow…

Tomorrow are the exams for the intermediate and advanced groups. I’d better get cracking!

Monkey game and final

It turns out that at least in one Russian classroom, “Monkeys” means something like “Simon Says.” The leader says for kids to do something and does it too, or doesn’t, and the kids who do it wrong are caught. I should have been playing this all along.

All day long, we finished up the last pieces of whatever we’ve been doing and then either sang or played games or both. Tomorrow our finals start. Kids keep asking me what the final will look like. “Speak, read, write, and listen to Russian.”

For the beginners, I have…
a bunch of T/F questions on their novel
a bunch of questions that I recorded and potential answers (both in Russian, so it’s a mix of listening/reading…not really what I wanted to do, but I forgot)
a number of questions in English on the last chapter of their novel. We haven’t read that one in class, so that will check their comprehension.

They will then come into the classroom to do spoken presentations. They’ll be allowed to run somewhat free on the presentations, which have the choice of telling the class background information about characters in the story (there is very little back-story there) or telling “what really happened” at some part of the story.

They’re not going to write, except to answer a few questions Bryce-style (that is, getting at the deeper meaning of the book). I decided I’ve seen enough writing, and I don’t want to have grading headaches.

X-ray girl

I was glancing through a reader and found a story with all of the last of the structures I needed for my intermediate class. It was about a girl with supposed x-ray powers, taken from a Russian newspaper. I think that anyone might be able to find the information in their own language … here’s the English wiki site info. Even though it sounds as though she was firmly debunked, it would have been amusing if I’d had more time to go to town on a story and then have kids find out that it was based in (claims of) reality.

We had a fun time, and now I’m going to have the kids do a different story using the vocabulary words in question. Phew! Saved by a walk with the dog (which is when I decided I’d walk to my classroom and just look through some readers).

I also printed out little booklets of all the songs they’d found and translated this year so that we could sing their favorites. It’s great for classroom community to do that at the end of the year. Each kid who’s picked a song enjoys hearing it sung loudly after so many hours of working on the translation. ‘

PS When I handed out the reading, one student looked up suspiciously and asked whether it came out of a textbook. She said she was going to lose faith in me if I was using that kind of material. I was glad to be able to say it was a reader…but maybe I need to inform the kids that textbooks sometimes have worthwhile information in them…