Many who are blocked to this process might take longer than others, and if your adult classes are short in weeks, you may never break through. But it is a side that can definitely be reached with adults.

Saint-Exupéry writes touchingly in the dédicace to Léon Werth in Le Petit Prince on this topic. He says that all adults were once children, but few remember (“peu d’entre eux s’en souviennent”).

Yes yes yes. If an adult had wrestled in college, and he offered the nickname Nacho Libre on his circling with balls identity card (see PQA in a Wink!), and I sense his pride in having wrestled in college, I ask him to stand up to do a little scene in L2 (not a story – just a ittle scene – we put too much focus on the story in TPRS, in my opinion), don’t you think that he would get into it?

Reaching adults is only a question of how you do it. How you approach them. We must tame them. Again, I paraphase Saint-Exupéry when he says we must build relationship (taming each other) – it must be done slowly, carefully, by pulling our chair ever so slightly closer, at the same agreed upon hour, to the one we want to tame.

Taming! Isn’t this what we do in teaching? But not as animals, but instead, with the heart. We tame hearts in TPRS. This is the essence of the method. That is why my teacher Susan Gross unabashedly tells those who can hear that the method is really about discipline and love combined.

Once you see the smiles appear with adults, when they trust you (when the child in them trusts you) to support their L2 acquistion process, to actually teach them instead of trying to find out what they don’t know, when that trust is there, you will see things in teaching you never could have anticipated.

But remember, it is how and not so much what on PQA – you must learn both – the science, the mechanics of PQA, and also the art, the knowing when to approach and when to lay back in those first few weeks of the class.

Ben

I have a question.
Do you think establishing identies/names can work as well in the adult education classroom?

My point is that when a child is forced to rely on the auditory patterns they have heard in stories as a basis for writing, without dictionaries (left brain) and relying solely on the sound of the language in their minds (right brain), then they are forced to, slowly over time, produce proper grammar in written form.

So we do not teach grammar per se with free writes. Rather, knowing that proper speech is proper grammar, when kids produce writing based on proper speech, their writing must then contain proper grammar. I am not talking here about teaching grammar TERMS, but real grammar, which is properly structured language.

Ben

* used often (generation after generation)
* applicable in many situations
* repeating persistent truths
* keep conversations going
* meaningful

when explaining the meaning in a song or poem, common wisdom sayings can be a useful reference.. such sayings can be referred to over and over again when distilling the “compelling” overall “message” in a story..

to really understand a saying, usually some kinda narrative context needs to happen.. i just learned “el que se lleva se aguanta” here in mexico which is kinda like “you can dish it out but you sure can’t take it” but less whiny and mas macho.. to learn it took a while, a couple of imaginary “for example” scenarios (stories)

some sayings are common to european languages.. for example a saying in mexico is “pajaro en mano vale cien volando” (a bird in hand is worth a hundred (birds) flying).. similar to english, so there’s background knowledge, but different.. basically another way to say basically the same thing, so fits in comfort zone..

before going too far out into songs, poetry, opera, literature etc, (fingers), maybe popular sayings are a useful point of reference (thumb).. sayings are used by everyone, not just those of use lucky enough to get an education in a school.. ancient oral tradition, arcing generation gap after generation gap.. vetted meaning.

using authentic materials is great because it helps learners connect with real speakers, ie fatal bazooka? formidable!! maybe one of the most authentic materials in language are the most common sayings.. here in mexico anyway native speakers love it when gringo uses “dichos” (popular sayings).. great way to connect

http://storyask.cc/dichos

I have a list of rules in poster form for free writes you can download over on the resources page of this site. I just tell the kids on Friday at the beginning of class to write for ten minutes following these rules. Then if I am not doing a song or poetry or something else interesting to me, then I just read some of their stories. I praise and praise. We spin new stories, etc. I try to read as many of their stories as I can, yet still have time for a French pop song like I have been blogging about.

You could ask the list for other details. Or you could search it on the list. as it has been discussed a lot over the years but it is hard to find stuff on the list, which is why I started this blog – WordPress offers those categories so I can find stuff easier. Some great stuff is buried in the thousands of posts on that list.

The goal is they write. It is just practice in writing. We do not assess except to praise as I said. Since I have a four point rubric and they are done in the kids’ composition books, I just eyeball whatever writing they have done every few weeks (dictees, freewrites, etc.) and then I don’t have to assess each thing they do. It just goes in the computer as a “writing” grade.

Writing cannot be authentic unless it has a foundation in listening, à la Sesame Street. So I like to personally wait until October before they even start writing. Then I start with five minute free writes and bump it up to ten in January. Exactly when they start doesn’t matter. They just need to feel competent and comfortable when they do it.

What should they write about? Anything, as long as it is in the target language! Most like to try to rewrite stories, with twists, that they have heard in class. Carmen Andrews-Sánchez once said on the moretprs listserve:

“I wouldn’t put any parameters on the writing other than it be in the target language and be in sentences, particularly at the beginning. You can either give them five minutes to write and work up to an end-of-year goal of one hundred words in five minutes.”

Diane Grieman has this to say about writing at the middle school level.

In beginning-level TPRS, we use writing more as an assessment tool to see how the students are doing. So I only have them write once or twice per month – that’s enough for me to see how much they’re picking up and where their problems may lie.”

I agree with Diane. Writing is not something first year students should be doing a lot of. Using it as a way to assess overall learning, however, is an excellent strategy.

A fun thing to do, if I have time, is to take a highlighter and indicate to the students how much of what they wrote I can understand by highlighting those just chunks of words. It is a very big confidence booster for them to see how much they can communicate ideas in another language in just their first year of instruction.

Ben

What a blockbuster thought! If we could but realize how complicated we make our lives in the classroom (cf. Merton quote on this blog), and how truly little effect our freneticism has on what our students actually acquire, then we might be able to do something about it.

This is the hardest thing of all, isn’t it? The more I talk to colleagues and read comments like this one, I begin to see that the trick is not so much in learning the new method as much as it is in letting go of the old.

Thanks for this. I have been wanting to put this into words for weeks now. If we can’t stop torturing ourselves, our embracing TPRS will stall if not come to a halt. Maybe this explains why so few people do TPRS even though as intelligent professionals who have done research on how we learn languages, they see its merits.