Embedded Readings with Laurie Clarcq and Michele Whaley

First off, it is always awesome to put a face to a name, but then I always try to put more information with the face and the name and my head usually explodes. This is what happened when Laurie introduced me to Michele today. Of course I've seen the name a thousand times on the moreTPRS blog and Laurie's blog, but I knew I should know more about her. Is she a colleague of Laurie's? Is she the one (of many, I know) from Alaska? Cue head exploding. So if you happen to be a witness to one of these instances of social despair, I apologize in advance. Anyway, it turns out that Michele is indeed a Russian teacher from Alaska!

In this session, Laurie and Michele worked in Russian (well, Michele worked in Russian and Laurie explained the pedagogy behind the embedded readings) to show us how this is truly beneficial to beginning students. This was my first experience with TPRS in a language other than French or Spanish. It was AMAZING! I realized that TPRS really does work...even if it's not in a language extremely similar to my second language.

Michele spent time working on a few key structures with us. Then she added a parallel story (I am assuming here that most of my readers know these basic ideas. If not, please add a comment and I would be happy to expand) in which two new characters looked at each other and said or did not say hi to one another. By this time, we were fairly comfortable with recognizing and understanding the new structures. Then, Michele had us write down the core structures on a sticky note. Then, she asked us to work in pairs to create a story in English using those structures and whatever else we wanted to add. She later used these student stories to create an embedded reading.

Okay, so what is an embedded reading? I highly recommend that you check out tprstalk.com for explanations and example stories. But I can summarize here by telling you the basic outline of an embedded reading. An ER is created to level instruction to meet the needs and abilities of all students. It starts with 4-5 core sentences that each student should have no trouble reading after circling and PQA. Then, in the next "story," those same core sentences are there, but we've added detail or a time stamp or a repetition of a sentence or a prepositional phrase or.... The teacher, or the class with teacher guidance, takes the second story, copies it, and continues to add. This can go on several times...usually 3 or 4 times.

Why in the world would we want to do this? Well, for repetitions sake. By the time the students have read all of the versions of the story, they have heard the core vocab in the prep circling and PQA and they have read the sentence (and understood it) at least 3 more times. Another reason is to scaffold for the slower processors. If you gave those students the final version at the beginning, they would look at the amount of words and give up. By giving it to them in this way, they don't even realize how awesomely they are able to read until the end. Ha ha! Teachers trick the students again!

Anyway, I am sold! I tried this a couple of times in the last year, but it seemed like a ton of work and it took so long to read that the students are bored. Seeing how it worked in this session with true beginners, I realize that my final versions were WAY too long to keep the interest of my students for that long. Plus, I was having them chorally translate each version. BORING! They could just as easily have translated to a partner or read silently and visualized. Things to do next year...