Are you a foreign language teacher who has ever wondered
how to inspire a deep and passionate interest in learning
a second language in your students?
Have you ever wanted your students to get
fired up about your class, speak the target language all
period long and laugh the whole time?
Have you ever wanted your students to leave
your class.....bilingual? Then you're in the right place.
Using Comprehension Based Methods such as
Total Physical Response® (Asher), The Natural Approach
(Krashen and Terrell), Personalized Storytelling and Story-Asking
and Reading, Karen Rowan teaches teachers to use high frequency
vocabulary to tell personalized stories about their students
in their target language (English as a Second language,
English as a Foreign Language or second language classrooms)
as their students act those stories out.
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Dale Crum,
Dr. Steven Krashen and Karen Rowan at a conference
in Denver in 2001
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Students comprehend the stories by virtue of the live
action visual aids and acquire the target vocabulary because
it is repeated dozens of times within the daily story.
Sentence structure, vocabulary and grammar are acquired
because non-stop comprehensible input is provided by the
teacher.
Storytelling methods are used by thousands of elementary
school, middle school, high school, college and adult
education English as a Second Language, English as a Foreign
Language and Foreign Language teachers nationally and
internationally. The long-term memory strategies, constant
comprehensible input and intense personalization of these
methodologies are based on the pedagogy of Dr. James Asher
(TPR®) and Dr. Stephen Krashen (The Natural Approach).
Students acquire the narrative and descriptive modes of
speech using repetititive and complex sentence structures.
Students become fluent and proficient in a second language
through ample exposure to COMPELLING, comprehensible input.
Teachers direct their efforts toward their students, rather
than the textbook, the grammar or the curriculum. We teach
kids. As a result, we have students who are excited about
foreign languages, eager to stay in our classes all the
way through school.... and who are bilingual.
We begin with Total Physical Response®
and introduce either the vocabulary word or structure with
a gesture or action. We then ask the students personalized
questions using those vocabulary words. We then use Berty
Segal Cook's Levels of Questioning to tell a story using
multiple questioning techniques. Students then act out the
stories as the teacher "asks" the story, (Story-asking
was a term coined by Jason Fritze at SWCOLT / CCFLT in February
of 2003) allowing students to participate in the creation
of the unique and personalized story. We ask questions about
a story using a high number of repetitions of the high frequency
vocabulary contained in the stories. The oral story is then
followed up with reading of a different version of the story.
Students rapidly acquire the second language just as Dr.
Krashen imagined: effortlessly and involuntarily. These
methodologies rely heavily on the five hypotheses of The
Natural Approach: the acquisition hypothesis, the input
hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis, the affective
filter hypothesis and the monitor hypothesis, which are
explained in detail in Foreign Language Education The
Easy Way, by Dr. Stephen Krashen, as well as lots of
comprehensible input through access to books, Free Voluntary
Reading programs and the creative and engaging use of culturally
appropriate readers. Find out
more about TPRS.
