Takeaways from Express Fluency: Latin Teacher Training with Justin Slocum Bailey

Over the past two days I was fortunate enough to attend a historic event: the first iFLT-style teacher training conducted in Latin. iFLT style means that we teachers observed while an experienced TPRS instructor taught a class made up of real language learners who didn’t know Latin- in this case, mostly adults, but usually I believe it’s school age children. Express Fluency, run by Elissa McLean, was the sponsor. Elissa herself was one of the Latin students, which I really appreciated as an observer. It was a lot of fun to watch her learn and get excited enough to use Latin with us during breaks! I hope in the future I’ll have time / energy to take Spanish or something from Express Fluency, since it’s local-ish to me and affordable (the credits were INCREDIBLY, pardon the pun, affordable, too: $62 each! what!). I also got the chance to briefly meet Laurie Clarcq, the co-inventor of Embedded Reading, who is charming and humble and full of great ideas.

You can find information about the detailed schedule here, but basically the format was this: over two days, there were nine hours of Latin TPRS and general CI-oriented instruction. We teachers sat behind the class and observed what the instructor did. In the time before and after the Latin class each day, we discussed with the instructor and each other what we’d seen and had opportunities to ask questions and discuss how TPRS works in the real classroom.

The instructor was this guy Justin Slocum Bailey, who came all the way from Michigan to Brattleboro, VT to educate us. If you’ve spent any time with him or his website, you know how lucky we were. If you haven’t, I am excited to introduce you.

Okay, so down to the actual stuff I saw. I’m not going to cover TPRS basics too much because there’s a lot out there already on circling etc. This entry is more specific ways I saw Justin using these techniques very effectively, or just things that I particularly enjoyed.

A quick disclaimer: these are my impressions of what Justin was doing. I can’t speak for his actual motivations or thought process. I’d like to think I’m accurate, but definitely don’t judge Justin solely on how I describe him here.

Staying in the Target Language: Tips from someone bad at it (& thoughts on an EdCamp)

On Saturday I attended langcampct, an "EdCamp" for language teachers. An EdCamp is an "unconference" (I know) which is sort of a thing where the participants themselves decide, on the day, what sessions they'd like to have, and there's no dedicated panel leaders or schedules or talks. On the whole, I think such a format would be most valuable as part of a larger pedagogy conference: one or two blocks of "unconference" with more structure for the rest of the day. That aside, it was interesting and valuable, and most importantly, free!

This is what our session schedule ended up looking like.
You can find notes from all the sessions linked there, and there are some additional ones here.

The session I got the most out of in terms of concrete ideas was about ways to encourage students to use the target language (editable doc: please be careful). I didn't love everything I heard- since it was not all CI people by any means, there was a lot about forcing output. But, this leads us to the main topic of this post.

One major goal for a lot of CI practitioners is to stay in the TL for 90% of the class time. This is something I struggle with big time for a couple of reasons. Mainly, I'm not that good at Latin-speaking yet. Working on that. But also, my kids aren't super interested in participating because there's no motivation for them to do so. I've tried a lot of different participation tracking systems but they're hard to keep track of in the moment and they're mostly fundamentally punitive. So... Gotta find a good way. Here are some things I've been chewing on lately, plus my favorites from this past weekend's "unconference."

MadLibs! How to get reps in without feeling the burn

MadLibs is a fantastic activity for when you are low on brainpower. It is a terrible activity for a day you are losing your voice, so don't use it then. It's also a great activity for your lowest achievers to get some class work done for once! TPRS stories are perfect for this since they're essentially MadLibs to begin with.

The steps to using it are as followings:
1. Earlier in the week, tell a story, TPRS style (or however). Maybe your story turns out like this:

Jack wants dogs. Jack goes to McDonalds. In McDonalds there are many dogs, and they are hungry. The dogs eat Jack.

2. Review it at least one more time through choral reading &/or translation or reenactment or something else to get them familiar with the target structures, story pattern, & vocabulary.

3. Hand out MadLibs sheet, which looks like this:

__________ (1) person
__________ (2) person or thing, plural
__________ (3) place
__________ (4) adjective (describing word)
__________ (5) transitive verb (I would never use the word 'transitive' for my students though)

 __________ (1) wants a __________ (2). __________ (1) goes to __________ (3). In __________ (3) there are many __________ (2), and they are __________ (4). The __________ (2) __________ (5) __________ (1).

Now draw the ending of the story to show me you understand what happened.

So you could end up with:

Hello Kitty (1) person
sandwiches (2) person or thing, plural
Rome (3) place
fuzzy (4) adjective (describing word)
kidnap (5) transitive verb

Hello Kitty wants sandwiches. Hello Kitty goes to Rome. In Rome there are many sandwiches, and they are fuzzy. The sandwiches kidnap Hello Kitty.

(imagine there is a beautiful drawing of Hello Kitty in a sack being carried by sandwiches here)

n.b.: The picture part is important because it shows you whether the kids comprehended their own story or not.

4. Reenactment time! Ask for volunteers to be actors & to have their stories read. Actors do not have to be the ones who wrote a given story. Read each MadLib aloud as the actors perform it. Reps, reps, reps!

Extra tips:

• The MadLib should be in the TL, but I always allow them to fill in the parts of speech in English so there's no limit to the madness. It also means even your weakest, most "I don't know Latin I can't do this" kids have no excuse not to write down some random words. 
• ... but  if someone puts an English word that you know everyone should have acquired by now (e.g. stupid = stultus, and they all know that), replace the English with Latin when you read aloud. I also always fix inflection of nouns, etc.
• Make it shorter than your original TPRS story. If your story had 3 locations, cut it down to one or two. Filling in the blanks gets pretty arduous.
• I often put them in pairs to do the MadLib part, since they're going to be asking each other for help thinking of adjectives anyway. I still require each individual student to make up their own worksheet though. Plus if some kids are slower to finish than others, you can have the finished pairs read & translate their stories together before you do the whole class part.

Here's a real example of a story I did plus its MadLibs worksheet.

Story Script: Hungry Hungry Students

Story Script: Hungry Hungry Students
Target Structures: consumere possum, male/bene sapit
Additional vocab: consumit, esuriens, fufae, babae, cibus, satis, satis superque...
Actor roles: "Iulia"
Additional actor roles: various things being eaten if you want

Link to story in Latin

English version with bolded variables

Julia is hungry. Julia wants to eat. Julia is in Rome, but food is not in Rome. What can Julia eat? Julia sees a table. "Can I eat a table?" says Julia . Julia takes the table and eats. "Eww! I can eat a table, but it tastes bad!" says Julia . Julia is still hungry. "I am going to Britain. Perhaps food is in Britain."

Julia goes to Britain, but food is not in Britain. Julia sees a big tiger in Britain. "Can I eat a big tiger?" says Julia. Julia takes the big tiger and eats. "Eww! I can eat a big tiger, but it tastes bad!" says Julia. Julia is still hungry. "I am going to Spain. Perhaps food is in Spain.

Julia goes to Spain, but food is not in Spain. Julia sees little fishes in Spain. "Can I eat little fishes?" says Julia. Julia takes the little fishes and eats. "Wow! Little fishes taste good!" Julia is not hungry, because she eats (has eaten) enough.

Oh no! She ate enough and more than enough! Julia explodes.

Story, Dictatio, & Cloze: 3rd Person Plural Verbs

This one may work best as a reading than a TPRS story.

Story Script: Brad et Angelina infantem volunt.
Target Structures: 3rd person plural present active indicatives of known verbs, especially volunt, habent, vident, sunt.
Additional vocab: liber (child, not book), ad, it, multi, iam, etiam, discedit, puer, puella, audit, pulcher, tamen, dicit, nihil, numquam, plorat, stercorat, est, bene, inquit, + some cognates
Actor roles: Brad, Angelina
Additional actor roles: babies, children, animals, dolls

Story text & additional resources under the cut. 

Stuff for your walls to help you teach and your kids learn

On the heels of my last post about the scary side of being a language student, it seems like a good time to share one of the ways I support my students' learning and my own teaching: stuff on the walls. All of the posters have both Latin and English. (editing to add: Tell me if any links are wrong or broken please!!)

How I use these:
tldr purposes:

1. Useful to point to when I want to use an adverb or something we haven't targeted yet
2. Scaffolds output activities with high frequency, very useful words.
3. Some kids use them to help with little words on assessments
4. More written Latin around the room means kids spend more time looking at written Latin.
5. Color and charm!

Most important are the Question Word posters. Many TPRS teachers use them. When circling, I point at the correct interrogative as I ask the class questions. Over time the kids mostly learn them without my directly targeting them.

The word posters generally are there partly for my own convenience and partly for the kids. It means I have more narrative freedom because a lot of the "little words" are available for me to point to when I'm telling a story. Sometimes you need a "therefore" that you didn't plan for and it's not worth fully targeting for this one time... so with these, it's provided. The kids also like them for doing free writes. I've also been complimented on my room by my department chair and principal, so that doesn't hurt either.

I heard somewhere that having lots of readable text just around increases literacy. That is a big part of why I made these. I don't know if it's true or what, but Latin Latin Everywhere seems good to me.

The good stuff is under the cut.

Story Script: arca plena simiarum / A Box Full of Monkeys

Here is a quick story I wrote up. I haven't tested it yet, but I think it'll be okay at least as a reading. You could cut parts of it and use it as a story, but you might need to simplify the vocab depending on what's known and unknown. I designed it to target the first declension endings & some basic uses, but it also ends up dealing with numbers a little bit and imperatives. Here's the link to the Google Doc. A text of the story with English is under the cut.

Target Structures: endings of first declension nouns (so not really a good "structure" as such)
Additional vocab: Glossary provided on google doc.
Actor roles: at least two monkeys, UPS man, girls, athletes, teacher, restaurant owner

Additional roles: extra monkeys, extra athletes, extra girls

Story Script & activities: The Gift of the Magi

Salvete omnes! It has been a busy week so I apologize for only now updating. Today it's just a quick set of links. I wrote a version of The Gift of the Magi in Latin, and I have an accompanying set of Flyswatter sentences and a Comprehension Check.

Story
Flyswatter
Comprehension Check

Sorry, no English this time! I found that my kids could understand the story if I just read it to them with gestures, but they received it better if we watched this somewhat creepy animation of the story first. Not recommended if the Uncanny Valley isn't your thing:

If anyone knows of an un-narrated version that still has sounds and music, please comment! I think it'd work a lot better for our purposes.

A unit post-mortem

This week's "unit" (I use the term rather loosely here) was to focus on mittit (sends), infinitive + scit (knows how...), and nescit (doesn't know how...). I also wanted a ton of reps using the genitive (possessive), so mater Iuliae / Marci / Grumionis (Julia's/ Marcus's / Grumio's mother) was another target. For plot reasons we also worked with the phrase vitam bonam agere (to lead a good life).

This is an ungodly long post but I hope it'll be helpful.

Story Script - Offerings

You can change "god" to "king," "queen," "goddess," etc. very easily. There are alternate endings to this one because different things happened in different classes. This gives you a good idea of how the same basic structures can end up with a totally different story.

Target Structures: likes, gives, brings, comes

Additional vocab: sacrifice (noun), gift, sends to prison, sword, kills

Actor roles: authority figure, worshiper/subject

Additional roles: various gifts (one class had human sacrifices...)

Story Script - Putting it on the table

I used this as a short dictation to introduce brings, comes, puts, & leaves. You could change it around a bit and use it to play with prepositional phrases.

Target structures: brings, comes, puts, leaves

Additional vocab: any nouns you want

Actor roles: student(s)

Additional roles: up to 4 students total

Story Script - Real friends help you...

I made this story as a dictation, but I suppose you could do it as a storyask too. This is a story that was really highly personalized to my students. The original had a student giving me a donut, because on the previous Friday I'd been all about donuts. There's a lake right behind our school. It's also a very small town, so they all know the police officer I put in the story. It may or may not work for you, but perhaps it'll give you some ideas. Replace JB with whatever celebrity your kids find irritating.

Target Structures: comes, gives, likes, brings

You could easily make this more about moods, too.

Additional vocab: kills, captures

Actor roles: two students, police officer

Additional roles: up to 4 more students

Story Script - Quam stultus infans! (What a Stupid Baby!)

I got the basic idea for this one from one in Matava's first book of story scripts, the one for the German structure "I can't do it anymore!" I believe.

Bolded words are ones you can let your kids choose.
Target Structures: puts (ponit), brings (fert), leaves (discedit), removes (removit). You could easily add "goes."
Additional vocab: doctor, nose, stupid, table
Actor roles: concerned adult, doctor
Additional actor roles: baby, thing in nose

Where are all the TPRS lesson plans?!

When I first started to look into TPRS, I was really frustrated at how difficult it was to find example lesson plans. All I could find was statements like, "It's hard to give a lesson plan for this since it was so specific to my class, but it went sort of like this..." If you've been looking for advice on TPRS, you probably have had this issue too. Or maybe you didn't because you're much better at googling than I am! :) Anyway, here's the deal.

TPRS lesson plans don't really exist as such because TPRS lesson plans look like this:
Target Structures: wants, has, is
Story structure: Someone wants something, but they don't have it. They go to three places to try to find it. Eventually they find it, or something surprising happens maybe.
Activities: Ask a story. Do PQA. Follow up with a Retell activity.

Well, okay, maybe they're not always that minimal, but they often are. The most "lesson planny" ones I've seen are the ones Keith Toda kindly did on his blog here and here. And those are AWESOME. But personally I am not that together. I tend to come up with a story by writing my target structures on the board and staring at them until something like a story structure emerges. This is not reliable, and I can assure you that doing it at 7:15 am when you're about to teach it at 7:40 is stressful.

The cool thing about TPRS though, the freeing thing which makes it so much less exhausting than some other approaches, is that you CAN plan a lesson with just your target structures in mind and see what happens. The key is that instead of having a Lesson Plan, capital L capital P, you have a menu of lesson options depending on how things are going. My mental lesson menu for the week looks like this:

Personalization saves the day!

This week, I have been focusing on imperatives with my Latin II's. I made up a long, complicated story that used my target vocab and had a few commands in it. I thought it was pretty entertaining. My students, however, were unimpressed. It wasn't really relevant to their lives at all and even though I had them choose details like locations and characters, it was kind of lukewarm. I also had trouble circling enough because I was trying to rush through to get done with the whole story. By the end, I had about 6 reps of "sumit" (picks up), and I'd used imperatives less than 10 times. For a long story, that's pretty low.

The last period of the day is largely made up of a lot of very perky, silly sophomores. They're also the ones who are coming out with the most spontaneous Latin, both in my classroom and apparently elsewhere. On the day I did the story, Cornelia happened to tell me that her mom "hates Latin" now because every time she asks Cornelia to do something, Cornelia says ,"non!" On the same day, the sophomore class adviser, who is also Maria's mother, had told them they needed to behave and settle down for me or else she wouldn't let them do Lipsync- a big school event for which they've been preparing for a month. Cornelia is playing a flip-flop in their act (don't ask). So, I wrote this story for the following day: