Von Ray’s Brilliant Approach to Extended Readings!!!
When I came to class this morning, Von Ray (de la classe de
francais) immediately gave me his thoughts on what I posted and
expanded on what he had told me about how he does extended
readings. It is so brilliant and yet so obvio that I could kick
myself!
Here is what Von told me he does:
He does ONE PARAGRAPH at a time. After the paragraph is translated,
he does a discussion - like me, he tends to turn the discussions
into PMSs, but it could easily be more like PQA. This discussion
can last a few minutes or the rest of the class period. When the
discussion starts to peter out, he returns to the reading and then
the next paragraph is translated. After that, discuss the paragraph
for as long as possible.
****HERE IS THE KEY TO MAKING THIS WORK****
If Von doesn’t finish the reading in class, he DOESN’T CARE. He
does not assign the rest for homework and he does not finish the
reading the next day. Nor does he quickly try to finish translating
the story for the class.
Why doesn’t he care if he doesn’t finish the reading?
1) It doesn’t matter.
2) He is teaching students and not curriculum.
Last year I made the stupidest, most elementary TPRS mistake I could
have made and, thinking that the reading was the important thing,
made sure that we got back to the reading no matter what. If there
was a really good discussion and we didn’t finish, I would make sure
we finished it the next day. In Von’s class they would go back to
acting out stories the next day.
The other thing that Von suggested was that the PMSs as written
could be used for homework as these should be entirely
comprehensible even to a barometer student.
He convinced me right then (he’s really a very good salesman - he’s
changed my mind about a lot of things this week; he should do TPRS
workshops or something :-)). Then, Donna and Sarah had decided to
try this out today, and it worked brilliantly. The little bit of
reading we did before beginning the discussion didn’t bother me at
all. It was just a little paragraph with a few words I didn’t
know. I could handle those few new words during the discussion with
ease. The discussions started out with a few literal questions and
then they started personalizing the discussion.
This part of the lesson lasted over an hour and the time flew by. I
think we got through 3 of the paragraphs in that time and I learned
so much French.
I am now convinced that I can make extended readings work in my
class. That was not something that was easy to convince me of
because my experience with them was soooo negative. I hope that Von
will demo this method in Vegas at some point, even though I won’t be
there. 
The whole trick…teach students, not curriculum. C’est evident.
Michael (Moco Loco) Thompson
