Draw and Discuss

This is awesome, interesting and zero-prep.

Some of my kids started drawing on the board between classes or when I was out grabbing coffee. Some of these pictures were awesome, and so one day I just started discussing these.

Phil is a guy. Phil eats apples in his orchard. One day Phil looks out the window and sees a giant angry apple named Alberto. The giant angry apple chases Phil, because Phil ate his son. Alberto eats Phil.

Today we had a cigarette-smoking penguin, and Dracula grabbing Phish. I asked questions such as what is Dracula thinking? and why does the penguin smoke? I wrote some answers down, and then circled— asked comprehension questions about— the kids’ answers.

I added personalised questions such as Bikram, do you smoke? and who likes to drink blood? We got some good weird answers and fun chat out of it.

Spanish teachers, note use of the subjunctive 😂😂. I don’t care if the kids can produce it but if they understand…

The next logical step would be, write these down and discuss them. I should upload the photos onto our class Team and get the kids to read these.

UPDATE: Inspired by Blaine Ray, I got a student to be the voice of the penguin. I asked the penguin questions and he asked me questions (like in a TPRS story). So if I narrate the penguin smokes, I will ask the kid speaking for the penguin do you smoke? and they will say yes I smoke, and ask me.

Anyway…enjoy!

Input – output = acquisition!

I did a workshop yesterday at Simon Fraser University and one of the standard questions came up:

Can people learn to speak a language without “practising” speaking it?

The answer, as forty years of research and 100,000 years of evolution show, is “yes,” but sometimes stories speak louder than data. So, today, two cool stories about acquisition without output.

First, here’s a great blog entry by Trisha Moller about language acquisition. She writes:

“Recently one of my administrators shared a story with me that illustrates what using comprehensible input and repetition can do.

My administrator was teaching English in Africa to small children before he became a Social Studies teacher here in the States. He taught very young children and used fairy tales to help them to acquire the language. For months he was reading and illustrating these stories. He read The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks, etc. He saw no indication that they were really understanding and they produced little language.

One day, one of the little boys was misbehaving and he was asked to stand outside the door for a moment as a consequence. It was hot outside and this lad did not want to be there. After the door closed he began to bang at the door and the teacher heard the following: “If you don’t open this door I’ll huff and puff and blow the house down!” My administrator was floored as that was the first English he had heard. It was spot-on for usage and the child showed that he knew just how to use it. It gets better though. Just after this, another young girl came up to the teacher and tapped him on the arm shaking her head no and said “this house is made of bricks.”

So, if you still think that TPRS/CI is not working, do not lose heart. It will take hold. Your students [if they are getting compelling comprehensible input] will acquire whatever language you are trying to teach them.”

The second story concerns my climbing partner Teresa. She’s Brazilian, raised in Brazil. Her Mom is Brazilian and her Dad is Mexican. When they were kids, Teresa and her brother heard Portuguese from Mom (and the rest of Brazil) and Spanish from Dad. Dad spoke Spanish to Mom, and Mom spoke Portuguese to Dad. They understood each other but never formally learned each others’ languages.

When Teresa was 8, her parents split up, and her mother married an American. Her stepfather spoke functional Spanish (to Teresa’s Mom). Her Mom, however, decided that the kids should learn some English, and so it was decided that stepdad would only speak English to the kids. So Teresa and her brother heard English, Spanish from their Dad on weekends, and Portuguese, but spoke only Portuguese. She and her brother also had a steady diet of American movies (variously subtitled into Spanish and Portuguese) and Spanish movies (also subtitled, mostly into English). She and her brother often also turned on the captions for English films as they found it easier to read English dialogue than to understand it in spoken form. They watched classic Disney films and Pixar movies over and over.

During childhood and adolescence, she had loads of input in two foreign languages, but no output: “both my Dads understood Portuguese even though they didn’t speak it much, so I heard a lot of English and Spanish but I never spoke it.”

When she got to high school, Teresa was put into advanced English and Spanish classes. She decided to go to Canada at aged 19 to University. She told me “when I arrived I could understand everything no problem. Speaking was really hard though. But one day about a month after I arrived, I was asked a question in class, and without thinking I answered in English. And after that speaking was no problem.”

Teresa got a job as a Youtube channel manager for Latin America and now uses lots of Spanish in her work. She speaks English (and Spanish) with an accent…but also with basically perfect grammar.

So…

— comprehensible input– and interesting repetition thereof– works
— talking is the result of acquisition, and not the cause. These kids learned without having to produce.
— later-acquirers will have accents…but having an accent does not matter
— no formal grammar instruction is necessary to acquire a language
— there were no expectations placed on Teresa and her brother to speak, write, etc– they just listened and watched
— they were never made self-conscious by way of correction of grammar or accent, or by being forced to speak

Cool, huh?