“I sweat when I teach.” — Maggie Smith, instructor

Best way to learn is thru workshops, not books.

FL Teach is a listserv for foreign language teachers. It’s where she learned about TPRs: Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling. It’s not related to TPR (at least not any longer)

Helps with problem of how to recycle engagingly.

Things she did that made me learn about things to be conscious of when teaching:

Her manner is a little impatient. There are right and wrong answers. She asks a pointed question as though it’s an open question, and seems irritated when we don’t get the right one. “What’s your biggest challenge as teachers?” Classroom management? No. Teaching to different levels? No.

Who knows what TPR is? (Apparently everyone.) Who doesn’t know what TPR is? One S raises hand and she doesn’t acknowledge him. I point him out. She barely acknowledges him and then gives a cursory explanation that doesn’t really explain: It’s when you say sit down, stand up, and son on, she says.

So: If you ask a question, really be asking a question. If you have a point to make, with a single answer, maybe getting the Ss to guess isn’t the right way. And if you want to know who knows what, be prepared to explain it in the moment.

Blaine Ray (a CA teacher, now retired) is the inventor of TPRs. It uses grammar not as a focus but as a means to meaning.

Begins with introduction of vocabulary. Drawings to demonstrate nouns. Gestures and sound effects to help express meaning. Chat. Souris. Bébé. Le bébé sourit. Regarde. Lentement.

Has them close their eyes and do gestures for the French words that she’s saying. Sometimes she points at them to say YES, but their eyes are closed.

She did something kind of cool: asked each student very clearly (in the native language) to hold up hands and show how much they understand, with no fingers meaning none and ten meaning all. Many Ss raised about 7  fingers. A few raised only one hand. These are her “barometer” Ss, with whom she would check in regularly to make sure they were bringing up the rear and not getting left in the dust.

After the interactive vocab phase she got actors from the Ss to represent the different vocab: a mouse, two mice, to big/small mice, handsome… then came maman souris and her size.

During the exercise, Natalia (from Russia) asked which it is in English: teeny or tiny. It’s always fun to field these questions that make me thing about my own language. I told her that we use both. But then I got to thinking about the difference between them. We say tiny more often. After a little more thought, I realized teeny is smaller than tiny. I love those moments of understanding what I’ve always taken for granted. It’s one of the joys with teaching and being around intermediate students and higher. High fluency English speakers don’t necessarily post the greater intellectual challenge than a low-intermediate speaker. I think it’s harder with lower level students because they ask bigger questions: what’s the difference between “in” and “at”? These are huge questions that, on the surface, look no bigger than Natalia’s question about the difference between two different words. But in the Mexico case, those two words are the tips are massive icebergs. It’s core grammar. With Natalia, her questions are more in the realm of semantics or pragmatics. I wonder if that’s a general rule: that teaching intermediate Ss necessitates  more hard-core grammar understanding on the part of a teacher (however it’s taught), while higher-level maybe deals more with semantics, discourse. Pragmatics are probably there throughout, but more actively in higher levels? And beginners are at the vocabulary/phonology level, and of course basic grammar, but not the gnarlier stuff. I’ve never thought about that: the level of your students has a great deal to do with which aspect(s) of linguistics the teacher needs strengths in. I’ve always been drawn to working with intermediate students because I’m afraid of high-level students — I don’t feel I know enough about academic English, though I used to be good at it. And beginners seem “boring” because of the huge patience you need, and that you can’t yet do the cognitive things you can do when Ss have higher comprehension and production skills. That may or may not be true, of course.

So in deciding who you want to teach, there are so many things to consider: your own level of comfort with particular aspects of English, as well as your own intellectual preferences.

Back to TPRs: Ss came up and acted out first the parts of the mice (as I said above), and then she introduced another character (the mother) and set the scene character by character. Then she introduced the cat and each character did actions involving the vocab she’d introduced. She tied the story (two baby mice, a mother mouse and an attacking cat) to Ss reality (the mother is in Facebook).

Then she had all the Ss break into groups and pick a character. And in French she narrated the storyline, having the characters do the appropriate actions on cue. The she had one S tell the whole story in French.

Third step is reading. She had the story projected onto the overhead. It was two paragraphs. Word by word she went through. What is this word? Les. The. Then she’d read aloud a whole sentence and have them translate the whole thing. She points out vocab things along the way: un chat… is it a cat or the cat? The students replied in choral response. Sometimes reading the sentence after her in French, sometimes translating. Sometimes she points out a grammar point — crient for third person plural vs. crie for third person singular.

Introduce a word and immediately personalize it. Do you have a cat. She encourages lying. I have 15 cats. Ss get engaged when you’re talking about other Ss.

They don’t explicitly teach pronunciation but rather rely on reinforcing it through repetition over the weeks.

Teaching observation: she invited feedback. One guy had is hand up for a while. She didn’t seem to notice. Then she said, “you… ” and pointed toward the guy with his hand up. He started to talk. She interrupted him and said, “no, you. You volunteered to tell the whole story in French. Why were you… ?” She shut down the first student. I feel that she needed to honor the other student. Once she’d finished with her other question, she said, “You had a question over there?” He replied, “No, that’s okay.”

I don’t like that I seem to be so negative. It’s just that I’m attuned way too much to the sensitivity of students, and now that I’m studying teaching, I’m even more aware. Why don’t I see more of the positive? What did she do well? Well, she’s into her method and gave a good demonstration of it. Her lecturing skills are good. Her interactivity skills are weaker. She has a very clear sense of what we want to get out of the lesson, yet is using interactive techniques. Sometimes they’re at odds. I think it’s important not just to use interactive techniques because they can be effective. You need to choose when they fit your subject matter and objectives. If there are framework things you need to bring to the fore, we need to think of other ways, and save the interactive stuff for when it’s suitable. It’s interesting about tools — from the technical ones I’ve worked with in photography, radio and Web, to methods in teaching. We shouldn’t use tools just because we have them. We should use them only when they fit. SIT places heavy emphasis on interactive techniques, and I believe in those, and want to learn how to step back from being center stage. I hope that the majority of my teaching is interactive. But when I do that, I have to be more flexible in outcomes. And sometimes, when I can’t, then I need to do things in a more structured way, sometimes even unidirectional. Or thru peripherals. Or something.

I’ve seen this phenomenon in a lot in classes that use learning-centered instruction, where the teaching styles backfire and potentially undermine the learning.  It’s like designers who put revolving images on Web sites when it doesn’t serve any informational function. It’s tacked on, and it doesn’t fit.

What’s interesting is that I’m sure they intend to be the best teachers possible. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t be using these methodologies. As teachers we need to make conscious our choice to teach in a certain style. When she’s teaching via TPRs, I’ll bet she’s really good. But in this workshop setting, she was teaching on two levels, and I think that must be hard. After my MAT training, I’ll bet I’ll have the tendency to fall back to an interactive style. But in the setting of this class, it might have been better to have a sort of structured segment where she tells us what she wants us to know. Just a few words on the board would have been okay. And then the main segment was great as-is. It was only the outer layer — the teaching the teachers — that I think her message and her style were not ideally matched.

Grammar is learning, not acquisition.