Upper Level Strategies (pt 1) by Lynnette St George & Carmen (in Vegas baby!) Andrews

With my new teaching position next year, I knew that I needed some information on how to make TPRS work for the upper levels.  I have a new colleague who has told me that TPRS just does not work with high schoolers.  Now, I should say that I think she uses a lot of CI techniques and is probably using TPRS in a narrow scope to mean telling silly stories about cats.  When I say TPRS, I mean all of the exciting things that I can bring into my classroom that came to be because of Blaine’s initial spark of telling stories to teach a language.  But I digress…

The main point (as I understood it), is to start any lesson with a goal and to be intentional with what and how we teach.  It seems common sense, but we really need to look at a structure or a grammar point and decide what we want students to be able to do with that structure.  Do we want them to be able to produce it correctly in writing? Speaking?  Or do we just need them to recognize it if they hear or read it?  Depending on our answer to that question, we need to adjust our teaching.  If we want them to produce it, they will need many more repetitions and practice with the structure than if we simply need them to recognize it. 

The main example Lynnette used as a model was an essay that she has her students write on their favorite movie.  In order to complete this assessment, they need to have a good knowledge of movie vocabulary, like horror movie, director, actor and they need to know how to make comparisons (I liked Jason Sudeikis better in Horrible Bosses than I did in Hall Pass).  So, Lynnette starts a LONG time before she actually asks the students to even think about writing anything.  The first step would be the introduction of talking about movies in the Monday weekend talk.  “Who saw a movie this weekend?  Did you like it?  Where did you see it?  Do you prefer seeing movies at home or in a theatre? Etc.” 

One thing that Lynnette said that stood out in my mind was the idea of avoiding one word answers by telling students they have to start their utterance with the word “I” (or he/she if they are answering the question about a classmate).  So simple, yet soooooo effective. 

Once the students have had enough practice with that, you start asking discussion questions on the topic.  In this example, some questions were “What is the title of an exceptional film?  Who is the principle actor?  What is the genre of this movie?  What kind of music did they use in the film?” And then ask some opinion questions about the film.  You wouldn’t ask these questions one after the other, but rather sprinkle them over multiple days or even weeks.  Then, when you actually ask the students to write the essay, they are already very comfortable with the vocabulary and have a good idea of what they want to say. 

We then talked about assessing speaking and writing in a quick, dipstick assessment vs a summative assessment.  On the dipstick, Carmen uses three grades: exceeds (can independently answer the task), meets (can answer the task, but needs some guidance), or below (can’t do it, even with help).  For a summative assessment, these change to A-above instruction level, B-meets instruction level, C-sometimes meets, D-below, F-far below.  The great thing about this is that YOU decide what the instruction level is.  If you aren’t worried too much about tense at that point in the year because you haven’t focused on it enough, DON’T GRADE IT!  They also suggested having anchor samples for yourself or your department so that everyone can remember what a B or an A looks like at the end of first quarter.  I love this idea!

Here is another HUGE take-away from this workshop: make your goal intentional by asking students at the end of each class/week/unit what they’ve accomplished in the last 50 minutes, using an “I can…” statement.  This helps students with metacognition and takes away some of the “All we do in French class is sing and tell stories” because students are constantly thinking of how much they’ve learned.  You can also ask “What’s hard about this?” and “What’s going to make it easier?”  I love this idea so much and I can’t wait to use it in the classroom!

When we started talking about listening, Carmen had a great idea that I have used in the past, but that I want to really focus on for next year.  In the past, I have told my students that “Je m’appelle” means “I call myself” but I don’t force them to read it like that when we do oral translations.  I did have a class that insisted on translating it that way, and I loved it, but I didn’t force it.  I will from now on because Carmen pointed out that, in the beginning, it puts focus on the meaning in a way that prevents silly slip-ups like saying “Je m’appelle est” because that would just be ridiculous!  She calls it translating literally versus translating for pay.  If someone were paying you, you would make it sound as natural as possible, but when you are translating literally, you read each word.  LOVE IT!  I also got a great natural use of the subjunctive in a daily class way.  Carmen says “I want that you take out your books” instead of using the imperative.  I’m thinking…maybe imperative for French 1 and 2 and then switch to subjunctive in 3 and up??