In this video Blaine Ray is serving as a guest teacher for a level 2 class. I always enjoy watching him in action and I definitely picked up some new tips from this one. We can observe step 2 of TPRS – Ask a story, along with MovieTalk, Student actors, and Blaine inserting himself as a 1st person parallel character.
I really like the way Blaine used student actors and the MovieTalk together. I think he keeps momentum going by bouncing from actors to video to himself, and back to the video. I think there are a variety of topics going on at once and is a great way to differentiate instruction. Nowadays, I feel like students need multiple things going on to stay engaged. Blaine is using the video very much like he would a story. Students assume roles of characters. He puts himself in the story as a parallel character and creates parallel stories. This is how we can really stretch the 3-5 minute videos we can find all over YouTube.
When I see others going on and on about MovieTalks, I am often worried about its efficacy as a strategy in TPRS. Specifically, I think MTs are most effective when the strategy is staying true to Ask a Story step in CI storytelling. If a MovieTalk is just TELLING a story, some of the magic is not there in my opinion. Blaine really makes the most of this lesson by adding himself and incorporating PQA, and using student actors. I recently modeled the very same MovieTalk lesson based on things Blaine was doing.
I consider this type of class a day 1 lesson. This is the language UPLOAD session where Blaine is doing a lot of Establishing Meaning work. In later classes, MovieTalks can go deeper with class discussions if we pick videos that lend itself to discussing a moral or something interesting to life or the interests of our students. MTs might be a short cut to helping new teachers too, because they don’t have to worry about the skills and the story… they already have the story and can just work on getting down the basics of teaching in this way.
Step 3 or the R in TPRS can be done is several ways. The activities I most utilize for step 3 include…Embedded Readings, choral translation into Volleyball reading, silent reading, and dramatic/radio show read alouds.
What a copy of this lesson? CLICK Here