At first I wanted to title this post "Differentiating for Heritage & Non-heritage Learners", but my idea is really the opposite, as I will explain.
In my CI/TPRS teaching, I design my instruction to promote language proficiency by providing input in the context of communication ("The interpretation, expression, and (sometimes) negotiation of meaning in a given context", to borrow Bill VanPatten's most recent definition of communication). One central way I do this is by ensuring that the language learners hear and read contain words and structures (the input) which are repeated a lot (a "high frequency in the input" to use the SLA/Usage-based research term I like). The standard TPRS practice is to get this repetition by Circling, where the teacher asks lots of similar questions slowly, so our beginning learners have opportunities to process the same words in a variety of target-like sentence contexts. When I hear Vietnamese and more advanced French, Spanish, and German in teaching demos, I am usually eager to hear even the same sentence a few more times. It's at my current ability to process and my current level of challenge. When teaching Mandarin to undergrads at the University of Hawai‘i, and to 2nd, 3rd, & 4th graders at Punahou School's after-school immersion program, I'm always teaching heritage learners (often half to 3/4 of my class) who already understood me the first time I ask a question. Circling questions are confusing to them. They understood me the first time, so move on. But the non-heritage learners want to hear it again. My solution for balancing everyone out, and keeping us all in the class discussion during the listening part of the lesson is what I'm calling "Bottomless PictureTalk" (basic PictureTalk is described here, and please message me if this idea has already been described elsewhere). If I can ask two questions about each picture and three about how the students' own lives relate to each picture, and I do this for 20 separate pictures, then that's already (5 x 20) 100 times learners hear and process a target construction (or an otherwise emergent construction generated by the students when I'm doing non-targeted CI teaching). "But wouldn't many students feel annoyed by 100 similar questions?" To answer to this question we can simply do a web page search. I recommend trying this now: 1) open a long web page, maybe the Wikipedia page for "China", 2) search the page for the word "the", 3) search for "of". My search found over 1000 matches for "the" and another 1000 matches for "of". But shouldn't I have felt annoyed at so many uses of "the" and "of"? Probably not, because language naturally repeats when we keep talking about different things. If you go shopping with someone, you might ask each other "What about this one?" as many times as you need until you find what you needed. Neither person is likely to say, "Okay already!! Please use a different phrase. I'm so tired of this one." We use language to focus on meaning, and if the referent keeps changing, we don't notice the repeated use of language. My thinking now is that when we are all talking about new things, new people, new places, and new events, we don't have to differentiate for heritage and non-heritage learners. Everyone can continue being engaged in, and contributing to, our discussion in the target language. The non-heritage learners get the repeating language as we talk briefly about each picture, and no one suffers from repeated content. See how I make my long PictureTalk files as speedily as possible at this post here.
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Reed Riggs (Author)
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