One of the central appeals of CI/TPRS classrooms is the mutual negotiation between teachers and students over what to talk about, and the details within those discussions. Stories details, like who a class talks about and how to describe those people, are usually chosen by the students. This gives the students agency over their own learning experience, and it promotes motivation and engagement with the lesson.
One drawback to giving students too much control was pointed out by Rachelle Adams and Anna Gilcher, discussed at this years NTPRS conference: learners often bring to these discussions ideas that reinforce social stereotypes and ideas which work against diversity. So here is where a teacher can add content that promotes values of diversity and inclusion. Eric Herman posted a very useful video showing how collaborative storytelling can work it classrooms. It also gives us a glance at the kinds of ideas that students bring into our classrooms: "fat girls," "eating hamburgers at McDonalds." These are the regular kinds of ideas we see students contribute in CI classrooms, toward which the other students often respond with laughter because the ideas are funny to them. I want to be clear that my intention here is not to take away from what Eric posted, but to add to it. In the kinds of stories that develop in classrooms (note: though not in Eric's video), letting students propose that a man wants a "fat girl" because it makes everyone laugh, or that a woman likes a "short man" because the idea is so ludicrous, puts teachers in a important societal role. A teacher can decide between: (1) reinforcing these prejudices, or (2) teaching diversity-positive values. In their presentation, Rachelle and Anna recommended using such descriptor words as "short" and "tall" to describe buildings and other physical objects, instead of people. "Fat" and "skinny" can describe animals in the story, instead of the women and men. When students propose that non-normative events occurred, like, "The man wore women's clothing, hahahaha," the teacher can choose to say, "Ok sure, but it's not funny. Many men do that. It's really normal, and not funny. But we can include him in our story because he might be interesting." Rachelle and Anna advocate that teachers work with students to generate a new word list. This list will contain the words that students use to describe the people they admire. After thinking and discussing (5 min. max), each student calls out who they want to be like (e.g. Mother Theresa, Lady Gaga, their grandmother), and what one attribute made that person so model-worthy (e.g. compassionate, brave, smart). These then become the words the teacher and students use to describe the people in their stories. This allows them to promote diversity-positive thinking while also using the language necessary to do that.
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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. In language teaching, we often talk about how to teach culture. In the CI/TPRS teaching I do, I often weave pictures of Chinese "Products" and "Practices" into my PictureTalk slides, and relevant concepts into the stories I write. But the current professional talk is really into a full three Ps: Products, Practices, and Perspectives. For novice learners, I often see teachers fall into an easy trap of over-simplification and stereotyping. This happens when images show Chinese people drinking hot water but Americans drinking ice water. The lesson implicitly promotes making assumptions about individual people based on norms which may or may not represent the fuller population and its various communities. It seems as if we want our students strike up conversations with Chinese people and say, "Oh, you are Chinese, so you must use chopsticks and drink only hot water." This seems irresponsible to me.
Recently when teaching Chinese jiaozi (dumplings) to students, one teacher, herself being from China, told us in private, "I'm from the south. We don't eat Jiaozi there." I remembered meeting people born and raised in Sichuan who don't eat spicy food. This is not a regional difference, but an individual one. I soon started thinking about how I was born and raised in the US, but I'm not into sports. Not one sport. Not a one. I mentioned to Ngan, my partner in teaching crime, what if we designed a unit about the people who don't do some norm in a country? Doesn't that kill two birds with one stone; introduce the perspectives of why people do and don't do some norm at the same time? Ngan responded, "Essential Question: Who doesn't eat jiaozi." Boom. Diversity. What a thought. In CI teaching, I might do this for my college students by PictureTalking with survey numbers provided by my Chinese friends. The survey would be designed somewhat openly, asking, maybe, "What do you drink with different kind of meals, and why?". For the 2nd and 3rd graders I teach after school, I might write a story about a person from Sichuan who wants a light-tasting meal. Each restaurant they go to offers a spicy meal, mentioning why spicy is good ("when living in Sichuan, I was often told that it helps you sweat, to keep you cooled of"). There. Products: food. Practices: eating spicy and avoiding eating spicy. Perspectives: keeps you cool and not everyone there cares about sweating to keep cool. Cultural norms as viewed from the perspective of non-participants, a kind of "local outsiders". |
Reed Riggs (Author)
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