Susie Gross is one of the original adopters of TPRS. Betsy Paskvan teaches Japanese in Anchorage, AK. Susie coined the TPRS catch phrase: "Teach to the eyes!" to remind us that we need to see comprehension in our students' eyes and they need to see caring in ours to create the optimal language learning environment. Handout.
To get language into long term memory it must have meaning and sense.
While TPRS does not overtly teach grammar for grammar's sake, we do draw students' attention to salient grammar points in the course of story-telling or PQA (Personalized Question and Answer). For example, French students already know:
danse = dances
When first using a new grammatical form, write it on the board, using one color for target phrase, another color for translation and a third color for grammar focus (I can't do it in this blog, but there would be a green box around /a/ and the /é/ of dansé and the /ed/ of danced.)
a dansé = danced
So, in the course of story, the teacher says "Fifi danse.", then asks "What does this mean?" The class says "She dances" then the teacher says "Fifi a dansé." and again asks "What does this mean?" If students answer correctly, the teacher asks what part of "Fifi a dansé." signifies the past tense. Then maybe asks: How would I say "Fifi sang"? "Fifi walked"? Then movea on. Comprehension has been established. The grammar point has been noted. Every time you encounter the passé composé from now on out, you can do a quick grammar pop-up and ask "What does that mean?" "What makes it past tense?" and then move on.
Then Betsy did a Japanese lesson. Whew! We really had to stretch our minds here, because there were so many words in the Japanese sentences that didn't seem to correspond to words in English.
Here's what I remember of what I learned:
Harry Potter san wa Hermione san ni kisu o shimasu. = Harry Potter kisses Hermione.
Now, it may be that kisu for "kiss" is not really a word in Japanese, but is being used to make that part of the sentence easy for us English speakers and focus our attention on the real grammatical points du jour. Then, we learned that san is a respect marker, so OK, that's taken care of. We still have a few extra words to figure out: wa, ni, and o shimasu.
Luckily, we have a Harry Potter addict in our midst, who points out that Harry Potter does NOT kiss Hermione, Ron Weasly kisses Hermione. So Betsy is able to focus us on shimasu vs shimasen which turn out to mark affirmative/negative.
Harry Potter san wa Hermione san ni kisu o shimasen. = Harry Potter doesn't kiss Hermione.
Ron Weasly san wa Hermione san ni kisu o shimasu. = Ron Weasly kisses Hermione.
So we're still left wondering about wa and ni. Are they somehow masculine and feminine markers?
When Betsy switches the sentence up to say that Hermione doesn't kiss Harry, we notice that wa and ni markers stay where they were in the first sentence and eventually discover they mark subject and object roles.
Hermione san wa Harry Potter san ni kisu o shimasen. = Hermione doesn't kiss Harry Potter.
Hermione san wa Harry Potter san ni kicku o shimasu! = Hermione kicks Harry Potter!
The whole verb portion of the sentence still felt a bit mushy, but in the end it seemed like maybe XXXu o shimasu really means something like "gives a XXX" as in "gives a kiss" or "gives a kick". At least that makes it easier for me to parse.
We had this session on the first day of the conference, so I'm not sure if Susie and Betsy refined it as the week went on. I would have simplified the Japanese lesson so there weren't so many points of perplexity for American learners. Either do just the negation contrast or just the subject/object contrast, but not have both in one sentence. It felt like we were being asked to take too much for granted and that it was hard to hold onto everything. I think I understood it pretty well, however it was way more left-brain thinking than I am used to in a TPRS class.
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