The TPRS novels have completely revolutionized my teaching. In the past 3 years I have used a wide variety of these readers with diverse student groups, levels and ages. While of course, the actual story line, plot and themes appeal differently to each individual student depending on their own personal interests, the idea of reading a whole novel entirely in Spanish and actually understanding what is going on, is hugely motivational across the board.
My students are all very familiar with my mantra "Leer es poder" (reading is 'power' or reading is 'being able', a play on words and sounds), so much so that when I say "Leer es..." the whole class will shout "PODER" back at me.
Personally I believe that part of our role as language teachers is to instill a love for reading. Teaching skills as well as content is widely recognised as part of our profession and reading is a skill. A skill that moves our students so far forward with their language learning, and with the TPRS books making this skill 'compelling', it motivates students to keep turning pages and keep acquiring more language.
In terms of reviewing a novel, I am not a big fan of the standard content testing so I have tried a few activities like 'the yellow brick road' and 'freeze frame' from Martina Bex among others. This time round I decided to make it more student-centered hopefully meaning higher engagement and less work for me! Win win!
Student-Centered Novel Reviewing:
- First each student was given a chapter (some chapters were assigned to more than 1 student). They had to find a phrase or quotation (maximum 8 words) that summed up the key information in this chapter.
- Next they wrote this in big letters on yellow card paper after I had approved it.
- I collected these all in; shuffled them and then gave a set of cards to each table of 4-5 students.
- Their next job was to try to find the chapter number and page for each phrase in their groups.
- Once they had this they had to put them in order. The first group finished was the winner.
- Next we used these for The Yellow Brick Activity where students in pairs used these phrases to talk about what was happening at that moment in the book.
- The final piece of the jigsaw was The Freeze Frame activity. We did various takes on this using the cards the students had created. In some scenes they had to act out the scene previous to what was on their card and finish frozen on their phrase, while in others they just acted that sentence.
The students really enjoyed all aspects of this and I am very happy that they know this novel inside out now. I prefer to always have the students do the work wherever possible and these fit nicely into that approach. One possible nice extension activity would be to ask the students to make up a completely new scene in a totally different context with the phrase they have on their card. Give them some time to prepare it and either act it out or record it.
As always I would welcome your comments and shares. Please let me know if you have done anything different as I am always keen to learn and try new ideas.
