TPRS works. This is an essay that a Spanish I student (non-native and no background in Spanish) did in class. Before teaching with TPRS my students never came anywhere close to results like this.
Student read Blaine Ray’s Patricia va a California in Spanish 1 over a period of 11 days. Many techniques were used. They read individuality and with partners, talked about it, acted out parts of it, and got background information about Guatemala. All work was done in class. No homework.
The challenge assignment for students that are advancing more rapidly was to re-read and then close the book and summarize each chapter. This is a bit too long of an assignment, and I do not normally assign work like this–I do not think it would work for every student–but the advanced students actually relished it. They were to summarize, not re-write, each chapter and they could not copy any sentences from the original. They could not use a dictionary. I normally do not correct much on student work like this, but this student wanted it, so I underlined the (remarkably minor) errors for her.
Click on the link to see the entire essay: https://www.brycehedstrom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Patricia-va-a-CA-Student-Summary.pdf
It is the method, not so much the teacher. My student teacher did most of the instruction for the unit on this novel. I coached her and gave her ideas and materials, but she did the teaching.
I love that essay. Very impressive. I have three questions about how the essay was written:
1) Did the student write all of this in one sitting?
2) How long did it take the student to write this?
3) Was the student allowed to use the book itself as a resource while writing the essay?
This girl wrote it over about two days in class, so it took maybe 90-100 minutes, including re-reading. Students could re-read the book at home and in class, but they could not look at it when they were writing. All of them followed the directions, as far as I could see.
It became super super impressive when you said she didn’t have access to the text during the actual writing of the summaries. Very very cool. Like a massive, awesome freewrite. Wow.
I guess it is something like a free write. This girl is a top-notch student, and this is not a typical writing sample for this time of the year, but I like to show what the more advanced students can do with enough input. We can reach students at all levels when we teach with comprehensible input.