Today I tried to survey blogs on tprs again. One in particular I wanted to join in on and it is via Word Press, the platform or whatever you call it that handles my blog but it won’t let me sign in or register! None of it makes sense to me.
So I will continue blogging and maybe someone who can get me i to the blog (T.P.R.S. Q & A – the blogger is Stolz but his name is impossible to find on the site. I figured it out by reading some posts to it) There are many people out there, most of whom I’ve seen on moretprs, a listserv. I intend to rejoin moretprs soon.
What I want to reflect on here is my finding my way to asking the story. Reading some blog entries on various blogs this morning, I noticed everyone talks about and asks about structures, but the examples offered are few. For someone who studies a number of languages and studies SLART I am sadly bereft of ideas for ‘target structures’. Terry Waltz asked me for some in Russian a few years ago and tried to give me some guidance, but I just could not come up with “structures.” So what I did was go back through all our lessons (we are on #56 today), incl. scripts, notes scribbled on poster paper (another problem for me since I don’t have a blackboard and that worked out for me b/c I cannot erase what we’ve done; it’s all rolled up and available for review), expressions and idioms, and all the vocabulary we’ve had and I’ve written down on posters (around 350 words now, although I am limiting myself in order to reused these words and not add new ones helter-skelter, i.e. as they pop up in stories or PQA, but that I find very hard to do. We keep getting new words and that is what drove me to go through and find structures to recycle).
IOW, my very success in getting Nyah to come with story ideas (see #Nyah Lesson #53 Breakthrough) leads to more vocabulary…. like cruise ship. Nevertheless, I am very happy she is entering into the story creation process and so willing to do some writing in French. I notice the differences between teaching a class of students and one student as I read over others’ blog entries.