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:

1. 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.
2. Next they wrote this in big letters on yellow card paper after I had approved it.
3. I collected these all in; shuffled them and then gave a set of cards to each table of 4-5 students.
4. Their next job was to try to find the chapter number and page for each phrase in their groups.
5. Once they had this they had to put them in order. The first group finished was the winner.
6. 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.
7. 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.

Being new to a school generally means that there is going to be some kind of performance appraisal and observations within the first few months and this school, I'm glad to say, is no different. It can, of course, be an intimidating experience both for the teacher being observed and, at times, the observer. What I like about the initial performance appraisal at my current school, ISL, is that it is all led by the teacher themselves. Every member of faculty had to complete quite a long self evaluation appraisal form on various aspects of our professional lives. From this we were asked to pick some focus points that we would like to work on and this would be used in our observations. Next was a meeting with the allocated member of the leadership team to discuss these professional goals, refine them further and let the observer know what you would like them to look for in your professional practice. ​Once specific goals had been set out, the observer did a series of unannounced drop-ins with a variety of my classes to see my teaching in action in short stints with various age groups. Finally there was an announced full class observation.

Now, as far as I am aware I am the only "TPRS" teacher in my school and I've actually already led a short language department meeting on its benefits after attending Grant Boulanger's workshop in Leysin American School in 2015. However, I am pretty certain most of my colleagues are indeed "CI" teachers as I know they deliver interactive, energetic lessons with lots of comprehensible input (I've already observed some of them in action!). Nonetheless, I was a little more than apprehensive about my first official observation in a new school taking place in my now deskless classroom with a crazy story about 'Kim-Jung Il' receiving a package from his scary auntie who was looking for someone to open it on planet Mars!!

In the end I thought "what the heck, this TPRS stuff was good enough for them to hire me so it better be good enough now that I am actually here!" - as part of my hiring process I had to teach a lesson and, 'surprise, surprise', I did a TPRS mini story (which they obviously must have liked!)! As the lesson and story developed I could see that the observation was going well as the observer himself was laughing away, repeating the story, copying the gestures and clearly learning a little Spanish. 

So why am I sharing this? Because TPRS works!! For everyone! All ages, genders, personalities and levels. As you can see from the Assistant Principal's comments below (that he has given me permission to post), it is clear that after coming by my class a few times, Mr. Anderson is also sold on the benefits of TPRS. If you are worried what your school or colleagues might think, or if you are simply toying with trying that first story but keep find reasons not do it, then stop. Just go for it. You will laugh, the students will laugh and they will learn. A lot. They will learn so much in one class and will be dying to come back to your class the next day. Now if that sounds like a good day at work then ask yourself again "what am I waiting for?".

Doing a book or novel in class is something my classes seem to enjoy a lot but it can be a challenge keeping it interesting and figuring out ways to evaluate their learning. I came across Carrie Toth's excellent website somewheretoshare.com last month and she has some wonderful ideas to do with novels.

I decided to use a version of her "Yellow Brick Road" one to recap and revise over the key points in the book once we had finished. The idea is you have 1-2 key 'triggers' of chunks of words from each chapter and these are used to jog the students memory to aid their discussion. The only difference I had was that I actually got the students to make the yellow 'bricks' and they chose the statements themselves.

I gave each pair of students a chapter (or some important chapters had 3 people working on it) and they had to find a key phrase that would jog our memories as to what happened at that point in the book. The only rule was it could be no more than 5 words. This part seemed to work really well, each student could be seen actively re-reading the chapter to try and pick the most appropriate word chunk for their poster.

Once everyone was finished a few students laid out all the yellow 'bricks' for our road out in the corridor. They did this in order as I felt like otherwise the chunks of words may not make sense to them. Students spoke in groups at each step using the prompt on the floor to help them. After about 60-90 seconds I would stop the music and they'd move on to the next card. To change things up sometimes I'd ask them to move 2 or 3 steps forward. I also mixed up the groups and pairs after about 4 steps so they weren't always talking to the same person.

I think the students really liked it and it worked really well as a student centred review activity. They were receiving lots of comprehensible input from their classmates and it certainly helped them to review and revise for the end of book evaluation. High five and thumbs up to the yellow brink road... I'll be using it again!

I'd love to know your comments and how you evaluate and review books/novels you have done in class! Leave me your comments below or follow me @liamprinter on twitter!

TPRS stands for 'Teaching Proficiency Through Storytelling' and basically it uses stories with lots of repetitions of key structures to teach fluency rather than detailed vocabulary lists. It is based on the theory of 'comprehensible input' which fundamentally outlines that to learn a language you need 'input' (words written and spoken) on repeated occasion in an understandable format. I was first introduced to it last year in our language department here at Leysin American School. I'm not going to lie, when I first watched the 'over the top' teaching of TPRS Godfather Blaine Ray, I was a bit skeptical but the other teachers in my department loved it so I gave it a shot.

At first it was nothing short of a disaster. I felt exhausted and flustered throughout the lesson and I think my students simply thought I'd taken the wrong pills that morning. But I persisted with the help of other teachers in the department and we then received two separate training sessions on the approach, one from Blaine Ray himself and another from Beth Skelton. I was hooked. After just 35 minutes of mandarin I was able to read and understand a full page of text and say various key sentences like "I need", "Have you got", "Where is" etc and I could understand more than 95% of someone speaking only in mandarin. After just 35 minutes! It really blew me away. 

If this is the first time you've heard of it you should take a look at Blaine's videos, follow Beth Skelton on twitter and check out Martina Bex's site too. I've never used any other method that worked so well at embedding difficult grammar. I've just spent the last two weeks doing a story with my Spanish 1 class about a guy who was lazy, and used to only sunbathe and watch TV, but then he went to the house of the Aunt of Jennifer Lopez and suddenly became a fitness freak. He went to the Olympics in Puerto Rico and won every gold medal before wanting to participate in a Taco eating contest with... well with Jennifer Lopez's auntie... of course! This was all done in the past tense using a mix of 'preterito indefinido' and 'imperfecto' and the students can all tell me that story now using those structures and speaking about their own life with the same structures.

Here is a picture of a previous story we did 3 weeks ago written as homework by a student. No google translator, no outside help. Simply a method that repeats the key structures with memorable silly details. Trust me, it works. 

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