Optimizing Immersion™

Fluency in Reading

By Terry Waltz - 22nd January 2012

The fluent reader is “one whose decoding processes are automatic, requiring no conscious attention.” (LaBerge and Samuels 1974) How fluent are the readers in your FL class? What do they need BEFORE they can be fluent readers? They need language. And they need to have acquired it, not just feel like maybe they’ve heard that word somewhere before. You can’t automatically decode what you haven’t acquired. In the 21st century rush to teach more faster to younger students, the ideas...

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Short Thought

By Terry Waltz - 27th December 2011

Fluency is being able to use all the language you’ve acquired unconsciously and correctly. Proficiency is being able to do that and also having enough vocabulary to make things happen in the world.

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But TPRS is so unstructured!

By Terry Waltz - 23rd December 2011

On a discussion board talking about learning Chinese, the comment was recently posted: It was only after I’d been learning Chinese for a while and had acquired most of the grammar structures that I felt comfortable learning Chinese in a non-structured way. This statement seems logical on the surface. After all, you have to “learn” the language first, before you can benefit from those loose, random interactions in the environment, right? The problem in this quote for me lies in...

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ACTFL, why stop at the sentence level?

By Terry Waltz - 20th December 2011

The new ACTFL proficiency guidelines are out for 2012. But they are still based on the outcomes from traditional rules-and-output language teaching. Yes, they aren’t referencing specific grammar points, which is a definite plus. And the requirements or wiggle room for errors is, in my view, appropriate across the levels. What I have a problem with is not expecting learners to use the language at more than the sentence level until the Advanced level. Huh??!? A TPRS-taught learner is easily...

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Question Words and More

By Terry Waltz - 9th November 2011

Posting the question words on the wall in plain view, with their native/shared language translations, is pretty much standard practice in TPRS, and for good reason: these words are used frequently in the TPRS classroom, as we circle, and without an immediate aid to establish meaning for them, the efficient circling of new items through questions in a way that immediately produces understanding would not be possible. I’m not the first one to point this out, but it can also...

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Tagging for acquisition

By Terry Waltz - 3rd November 2011

We can’t see exactly how the brain works its magic in generalizing from many examples to just knowing what structure to automatically use to express a meaning it has never tried to express before — which is what fluent speakers can do. What if we think of it in terms of tagging? It’s sort of like the man in the brain has to tag each structure that comes in, but to tag the structure — to sort of label what...

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Unknowns and Comprehension

By Terry Waltz - 1st November 2011

On a language teachers’ group, a comment was recently posted to the effect that maybe language didn’t have to be 100% comprehensible, because a young native speaker could go for a long time before asking what a key word meant. Maybe, the poster offered, comprehension could be delayed and still be comprehension? There’s a very important difference in the conversation with a 10-year-old native speaker and the way students learn L2 in the classroom, though. In the example that was...

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Purpose-Written Texts

By Terry Waltz - 31st October 2011

Having problems with free reading? Free reading is a great idea, but to get reading happening, you need texts that are 100% comprehensible, even to students who have never seen the written form of the language before — even if the language is a non-simple script language. Enter the purpose-written text. Purpose-written texts look a lot like storybooks. That’s the danger — teachers who don’t realize the difference all believe that they’re “just” children’s books. Children’s book are for children...

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Don’t map curriculum, tag it!

By Terry Waltz - 27th October 2011

One reason why some folks aren’t keen on TPRS® is that it doesn’t embrace the themed unit. Most textbooks and curriculum documents are organized into themes. “My Family.” “School and Home”. “Celebrations”. Those are great, if you believe that giving people the ability to say a whole lot about a very little is the way to go. TPRS® does things the opposite way: we give students the tools to say a little about a whole lot of things, and then...

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Is “free” reading what it’s really worth?

By Terry Waltz - 25th October 2011

Free-reading is great. Everyone wants a classroom library. Everyone wants to have kids sitting quietly, absorbed in authentic materials in the target language. But is it the best use of acquisitional time for a novice-level learner? I say no. Because free reading is less-than-100%-comprehensible immersion. I am thinking of novice-level learners here: first- or possibly second-year students for the most part, though second-year TPRS-taught students will have more language to leverage. The use of “immersion” in novice-level programs these days...

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