Monday, July 25, 2011

Contrastive Grammar-Susie Gross and Betsy Paskvan

Grammar in a TPRS classroom?! No way! Yes way!

I loved this because it gave us 3 basic skills to practice.




  1. For our low performers, we ask them to translate a piece or a phrase that it already written on the board. This is the same as in comprehension checks...


  2. For average students, we ask them to transfer the grammar rule we are practicing to another known phrase. For example, "If jouons means (we) play, what does chantons mean?" They should be able to figure that out...


  3. For superstars, we ask them to produce language. "How would I say We like?"


We got to practice this skill, alternating between circling questions and the different levels of grammar pop-ups. Great practice.



The other thing that I really got from this session is the idea of color-coding my board. French should be in one color, English in another, and the grammar point should be in a third color. That's hard to picture, but I'll try to explain it: In the above example, I would write jouons in black, (we) play in blue, and then I would put a red square around the "ons" and (we) so that students can begin to see the pattern.



Great session and my first time to see Miss Susie in action!! AND, I almost forgot that I got to learn some Japanese!! Really amazing... Betsy was so in love with the language and the culture...it was hard not to get sucked in!

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