Go With The Flow

As usual, this past Wednesday I wasn’t sure where my Hebrew classes would take me.  Where would our conversation meander, with my prompting and guidance, and what hi-frequency language could I wrangle from it?screen-shot-2016-10-29-at-10-46-36-am  I knew we needed to keep playing with the hi-frequency language we’d used thus far, and I was wary to start introducing more new words.  The previous (Sunday) Hebrew class was so short – I teach three consecutive 20-minute classes – and with transition and settling time, the kids barely get 12-15 minutes of Hebrew instruction.  Wednesday’s 35-minute classes are the heart of the program.

I loosely planned to continue with our (cognate-filled) animal story from the previous week.  I’d surveyed the kids about their pets while circling doesn’t/have, goes and wants  ( יש, אין, הולך, רוצה).*

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Then I sent a pet-seeking volunteer to various pet stores (location posters) around the room, where the shopkeeper (classmate) offered a gorilla, flamingo, zebra, or giraffe.  I was willing to see where the story would go, prepared to layer on a new hi-frequency structure or two, as necessary (i.e., takes it home; buys it; says to –       לוקח הביתה, קונה, אומר ל).baby_giraffe_cartoon-994

The best laid plans….

Wednesday was a rainy, gloomy evening, and the Chicago Cubs had just lost Game 1 of the World Series, 6-0, the night before.  The kids looked tired when they entered the Hebrew room.  I asked some icebreaker questions with charades-like gesturing:  Are you hungry?  Are you sad?  Are you tired?  Presto!  The majority of the kids were understandably exhausted, having been up late the night before watching the Cubs’ drubbing.  I promptly wrote:  אני עייפה, אני עייף  and their translation, I’m tired, on the board.  One of the teachers offered, אני ממש עייפה – ‘I’m REALLY tired!’ and after we established the meaning of the phrase, several boys and girls agreed:    ‘!אני ממש עייף!’   ‘אני ממש עייפה’th

Being the conscientious professional that I am, I did as any self-respecting Jewish Mother-turned Hebrew School teacher would.  I offered them a nice nap.  Right then and there.                           ‘?את/אתה רוצה לישון’  ‘Do you want to sleep?’  One volunteer ‘slept’ on a bed made of 3 class chairs lined up side by side, while his bunkmate slumbered beneath.  A girl snored loudly under a table in the corner, as did a boy on the opposite side of the classroom.  Yet another student sprawled out under her seat.  We (remaining & awake audience members) checked on each of our nappers.  ‘Is s/he tired?  Is s/he sleeping?   Wow!  S/he’s really sleeping!  S/he’s really tired!’  I called up assistants to gently awaken the nappers.  We tried coaxing our sleepers to their feet with soft whispers, light tickling and improvised songs (I led a בוקר טוב = Good Morning song to the tune of, “If You’re Happy and You Know It”).  A girl in one class suggested we tickle our sleepers with my rubber lettuce leaf -סלט – under their noses.  It worked!  We continued around the room playing with each sleeping kid, mirthfully attempting to wake them while getting tons of repetitions on phrases such as, ‘S/he’s sleeping; s/he wants to sleep; s/he is tired.’  Finally, as time ran out, we reached consensus on an appropriate alarm clock sound, and woke our slumberers with a choral sound effect:  Beeeeeeeps, rrrrrinnnngs, and one class decided on a continuous loop of, “!קום בבקשה” – ‘Get up, please!’

screen-shot-2016-10-29-at-8-28-24-pmOur scene went absolutely NOWHERE.  The initial query, “Are you tired?” set the docket for the rest of class.  We simply and gleefully played with the unlikely possibility of taking a teacher-sanctioned nap in Hebrew class.  We explored each actor’s interpretation, one after the next, affording lots of silliness, laughter, and compelling repetition.

As Dr.  Stephen Krashen, father of modern Second Language Acquisition theory says, “Language acquisition proceeds best when the input is not just comprehensible, but really interesting, even compelling; so interesting that you forget you are listening to or reading another language.”

I’ll bet most of the kids didn’t even realize, in the moment, that it was all happening in Hebrew.

*For more info on circling and other Teaching with Comprehensible Input foundational skills, check out these Powerpoint presentations:   Reimagining Modern Hebrew Language Instruction and T/CI Foundational Skills, which are also on my blog homepage tabs, Intro to T/CI and Optimizing SLA, respectively.

The Horse and the Cart

Some say the aural-input-based Hebrew instruction I’m championing may very well represent a departure from our 4,000+ year old Jewish tradition of prioritizing literacy – of teaching Jewish content through Hebrew texts.screen-shot-2016-10-13-at-8-45-53-pm

Not so, I protest.  It’s just that starting with Hebrew writing is putting the cart before the horse.

My father and his father before him attended a Hebrew school (or ‘cheder’) whose sole purpose was to get the students decoding Hebrew, well and fast enough to daven (pray) from a siddur (daily prayer book).  It’s purpose wasn’t explicitly to understand the prayers therein – not even their main ideas – and certainly not their constituent words.  It was to engrave the order and content of daily and holiday prayer into the collective memory of the next generation.  Not a small or insignificant undertaking.  And it was quite effective.  My father, Saul Shapiro, ז׳׳ל, davened fluidly and could read the prayers accurately, even though as a busy doctor and parent of four he rarely attended synagogue.  I used to love watching his whispering lips as he sailed through the quiet, meditative prayers during high holiday services.screen-shot-2016-10-13-at-8-48-05-pm

But we must ask ourselves now, what do we want from our kids’ Hebrew/Jewish education?  And what do our kids want and need?

We have the benefit of brain science and evolving language pedagogy, not to mention a vast cultural shift, allowing and inviting us to search for meaning in our Hebrew and religious school offerings.  If we want only to prepare our students for traditional life-cycle events such as as bar/bat mitzvah or confirmation, and how to blast through a holiday מחזור, then the status quo of starting (and ending) with Hebrew texts gets the job done, I guess….  But many a Hebrew school student (and traditionally taught French, Spanish or other World Language student) complains about taking 4+ years of language class with NOTHING – NO USEFUL RETENTION to show for it.

Most of us want more, and more importantly, our kids want more.  Not more work or aggravation.  More meaning.  Less drudgery.  Inherited traditions and liturgy are cloaked in a veil of Hebrew mystery to less-observant Jews who don’t attend day-school.  So how can we make them more visible, comprehensible and meaningful?

We need to front load tons of oral Hebrew understandable input before setting our kids to the task of Hebrew reading.  This is the proverbial horse.
Just as our toddlers were drenched in oral language before we taught them the letters, their sounds and words they form, so we must flood our Hebrew school students with interesting and understandable aural messages in Hebrew, if we want them to recognize, and attach meaning to the words and sentences we later ask them to decode and read.

Will the simple, high-frequency-verb-filled scenes and stories we create and later read in Comprehensible Input-based Modern Hebrew class transfer to comprehension of ancient prayer texts?  Not entirely – but there will be some overlap.  Students may begin to see other forms of familiar verbs (i.e. אומר – ויאומר) – and deductively make connections based on verb roots.  They’ll see familiar prefixes & suffixes, articles, connection & transition words.

But my practical question, as a Modern Hebrew language enthusiast and instructional reform advocate,  is this:  What are the odds that someone who can decode the prayers but not understand any of them, will continue seeking more comprehensible Hebrew input, which will inevitably lead to more acquisition?  Will they even see a connection between the prayer words they can read, and the living breathing Modern Hebrew language?screen-shot-2016-10-13-at-8-53-28-pm

Compare those unfavorable odds to the kid who’s been exposed to plenty of comprehensible auditory input, and has enjoyed pleasure and success in a meaning-centered Hebrew CI class, chock full of conversational exchanges.  Put a prayer text in front of her and ask, “Do you understand this?”  Depending on the CI-taught kid’s ability/level, she may extract some nuggets of meaning.  Even if she doesn’t yet understand the antiquated and stilted prayer text before her, she’ll still come back for more CI, because it’s fun, its effective and success begets success!  Keeping our kids in the Hebrew game is crucial.  Getting exposure for only an hour or so per week (in supplementary school) or 3.5 hours (in a public high school elective program) is slow going toward proficiency.  I’ll opt for Plan B, with Comprehensible Input instruction affording a greater likelihood of longer-sequence and more pleasant engagement with my students.

Hebrew text is important and, many would argue, the epicenter of our tradition.  Reading is the single most effective way to grow one’s language acquisition.  But the order is crucial, particularly for beginners:  Slather on the aural input – drench and soak in quality, compelling comprehensible messages.  THEN, read, rinse, and repeat.

Let’s put the listening horse back where it rightfully belongs:  Before the reading cart.

 

Personalizing and Customizing the Comprehensible Hebrew Classroom

You may wonder, dear reader, “Where can I get my hands on a curriculum and/or pacing guide for teaching Comprehensible Hebrew?”  The quick answer to your query is unpopular but true.  A Comprehensible Input-based curriculum is a moving target, and a very personal one at that.  Personal to the teacher’s style and imagination, and personalized to meet the developmental, individual, social and cultural needs of her students.  In short a Comprehensible Input-based curriculum is emergent – generated from the interests and ideas of the group/s you’re teaching.  (Though I am noodling the idea of creating a Hebrew supplementary school articulated curriculum….stay tuned!?!)

Take for example the story seeds I was sowing in my 6th-7th grade group on Wednesday night.  I don’t really know these 25 kids yet (it was only our 3rd meeting), so I still rely on name tags to identify them.  I certainly don’t know what their interests and passions are yet, though I’m beginning to explore this in an effort to build relationships and create a positive classroom community.  I knew I wanted to start exposing the group to some of the highest frequency verbs, so I decided to get started with a safe crowd-pleaser topic, food, using the verbs ‘likes/loves’ and ‘(doesn’t) have.’  (i.e., איו, יש, אוהב)  This was the basis for my Wednesday lesson plan.

I pre-selected some Hebrew cognate food props from my vault of amazing plastic facsimiles, then, I printed out some local restaurant logos from Google images, to match the food choices, and made colorful posters of these locales to hang throughout the classroom.  (I heard the kids mention some of the restaurants during our last class together).  A local Italian place, two burger joints (so I could get some compare/contrast language in – more on that another time), and a Middle Eastern spot, all within minutes of the temple.  Class runs from 5:30 – 6:00pm, so I knew that dinner fare would play well.

Already I had several ingredients for a customized experience:  Familiar kid-friendly foods that they were likely to have opinions about, from local places that most kids would know first-hand.  The evening menu then became an exploration of food/restaurant preferences, within a simple and repetitive story framework.

Like all stories, mine had a central problem that emerged when my student, Leah volunteered that she loves felafel.screen-shot-2016-09-17-at-4-51-58-pm  For nearly 25 minutes we spent time in Hebrew trying to track down felafel for our hungry protagonist.  First she went to Maggiano’s, our Italian venue, hungrily seeking felafel.  I accompanied her across the classroom toward the Maggiano’s poster, where a Maggiano’s representative/classmate was waiting, a luscious slice of (plastic) pizza in one fist, a rubbery beige disc of coiled pasta in the other.  I did the talking while my actors silently brought our drama to life.  As dramatic director, I coached Leah to rub her stomach, stating that she loves felafel, while the class confirmed that no, unfortunately Maggiano’s doesn’t have felafel.  It has pizza, and it has spaghetti.

ME:  “Do you like pizza?”

LEAH:  “No.”

“Class, Leah doesn’t like pizza!”screen-shot-2016-09-17-at-4-59-06-pm

“Oh, No!”

Do you like spaghetti?”

No.”

“Class!  Leah doesn’t like spaghetti!”

“Oh, no!”

“Leah, what do you like?”

“Felafel!”

Class, what does she like?”

“Felafel!”

“Does Maggiano’s have felafel?”

“No!”

“Class, Maggiano’s doesn’t have felafel!”

“Oh, no!  Oh, no!”

“Maggiano’s doesn’t have felafel!  Who has felafel?  Does Portillo’s have felafel?”

Our conversation continued in this way, punctuated by student rejoinders – (אוי ואבוי = Oh, no!) –  as Leah sought hunger relief at Portillo’s and Poochie’s.  By the end of class she had trekked around the room from eatery to eatery, rejecting (plastic) pizza, spaghetti, burgers and fries (with ketchup – also a cognate!)  Finally, she stood face to face with a classmate/employee at Pita Inn.  “Does Pita Inn have felafel?”  Everyone was ready to escape this onerous predicament.  “Yes!” they all chimed in.  “Pita Inn HAS felafel!”

At the end of class Leah received a plastic pita bread (aka felafel sandwich) and pretended to hungrily dig in.  We applauded her perseverance and drama skills, and we all went home to dinner.

Day 3 for this group (+-90 cumulative minutes of instruction) – and they just co-spun their first Hebrew story.

Our First Hebrew T/CI Training: Day 3

During training day 1 or 2, Lori, our education director suggested integrating aspects of modern Israeli life/culture into our language instruction, and while I’m not convinced of its role for novices, (and I’ll probably blog about that topic sometime soon), I took up her challenge…sort of.  I decided that our week 2 extended story-asking demo in Hebrew would be based on a cute Israeli TV commercial.  It would serve as my inspiration and qualify as an authentic resource! (Oy.  Don’t even get me started on that topic!)  I planned to ask a story, dramatize, read, and finally show the clip – as a nice Social Studies-esque tie-in.

This phase of ‘lesson planning’ is critical for T/CI teachers:  Choosing a prompt or storyline or just some high frequency and/or compelling structures, and deciding what other language they will use with their students to talk and ask about.  Often we teachers go way too wide, stuffing a simple storyline with 6 or 10 verb structures or forms, lots of glue and transition words, some rejoinders and other new-sounding vocab.  But we must err on the side of simple and narrow, (I say this to remind myself, too!) especially for novice learners.  In the case of our temple students, we will assume they are all absolute beginners in Hebrew, even though some are ‘sloshers’ (this is Terry Waltz’s excellent term), who have isolated words and phrases, songs, poems, prayers and other memorized chunks from past instruction sloshing around their brains.  Because they have not been exposed to comprehensible, compelling and contextualized extended discourse in Hebrew, we will start building their Hebrew foundation slowly, from the ground up.

Back to the story and the clip.  It’s about a guy who’s sleeping.  He gets up and sleepwalks to the fridge, which is empty, then to the supermarket, which is also empty.  Bingo!!  We have a classic storyline – someone wants or needs something and goes from location to location to find it!

We began asking and dramatizing the plot in our training session.  I instructed one of the teachers to lay down and pretend to sleep…then open her mouth in search of something to eat.  We had her sleepwalk all over the temple library – we even had her open the fridge in the adjacent kitchen!  On my cuing, she considered but rejected several of the offerings on the breakfast buffet – the yogurt, the banana, the bagel – until she found something she liked, “woke up,” and pretended to eat it.  The end.

According to Terry Waltz’s Cold Character Reading (CCR) protocol, the students must hear and comprehend target structures around +- 70 times apiece in an oral class, then have the written version reinforce these target structures another 30 times or so.  I wrote up the Hebrew story, What’s the problem?  but with slight variation for interest, matching the action of the as yet un-screened clip.  I tried to get dozens of repetitions on my targets: ‘is sleeping’ and ‘walks’ as well as the words for ‘There is/are” and “There isn’t/aren’t.”  (A few other verb forms in the story, like ‘gets up’ aren’t really targeted – let’s assume students already know ‘gets up’ from beginning-of-year Total Physical Response [TPR] – Get up, sit down.)   ?מה הבעיה  (What’s the Problem?) is an example of a simple story line stretched out and massaged into an episodic extended block of text with lots of patterned repetition.screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-11-00-44-pm

BTW, I count the following # of reps on my targets in the reading:  Sleeps = 12; walks = 12; there is = 18; there isn’t = 13.  I’ll try to double up next time!  These ballpark numbers are for the decoding magic of Cold Character Reading to work; if students are already decoding well in Hebrew, then this is a fine classic CI story with adequate contextualized reps to boost comprehension and retention!

The teachers found it so satisfying to read, and deepened their understanding of how the earlier barrage of comprehensible, compelling and contextualized auditory input prepares their students  for successful reading (more input).

Oh, and here’s the YouTube link to the commercial for Yotvata Chocolate Milk.  Enjoy!

Our First Hebrew T/CI Training: Day 2

As I mentioned previously, teachers really seem to dig the Novice Hebrew Corpus, as it affords manageability, making story-asking feel less…daunting and unwieldy.  Combining question words with high frequency verbs and cognates or proper names/nouns feels do-able, and I demonstrated lots of engaging circling with these few key ingredients.  With the corpus in hand, we can start to imagine storylines and lines of questioning to ask stories!

Before embarking on the Foundational Skills of T/CI, we explored existing Hebrew ‘legacy’ materials that I’d brought along – basal readers, texts and workbooks commonly found in Hebrew supplementary schools.  Our teachers are now armed and able to recognize the shortcomings of these published textbooks:  They are unappealing – the pictures don’t reflect our students lives or interests; they are boring – nothing really seems to happen in the brief scenes and scripted dialogues; the Hebrew itself seems randomly chosen or focuses on religious holiday vocabulary, not basic face-to-face communication, and is not controlled for frequency or massive repetition.  It’s all over the place!  Furthermore, the beginner level basal readers invite students to decode lists of nonsense words and isolated syllables (in order to practice the Alef-Bet)…an activity long since abandoned in Language Arts classrooms, and definitely not a respectful task!

Session 2 ended with teachers brainstorming an extended scene based on  2 onscreen target structures:  ‘Sleeps’ and ‘hears.’  Imagine the possibilities!  Someone (Who?) is sleeping and suddenly hears a noise.  What is it?  An ambulance?  A dinosaur?  His telephone?  What happens next?screen-shot-2016-09-14-at-1-21-01-pm

 

The collaborative story-spinning possibilities are limited only by our (students’) creativity!

Our First Hebrew T/CI Training: Day 1

We recently completed 8 hours of Teaching with Comprehensible Input (T/CI) teacher training at Temple Beth Israel (TBI).  I presented 2-hour sessions on Monday and Wednesday mornings, for 2 consecutive weeks.  There were (usually) 9 participants, including 6 TBI teachers and one teacher from another temple, Lori (the education director), and me.

Lori made sure we had a lovely breakfast spread for each training segment, and we shared a bite around the table together before transitioning to our presentation space in the cozy temple library.  On the first day, I briefly explained ‘How I got here’ and we went around the table answering the question, “What do I hope to get out of this Hebrew instructional training experience?”  Not surprisingly, everyone was looking for ways to spice up Hebrew school, get and keep our kids interested and engaged, and of course, impart real-world Modern Hebrew communication skills.  screen-shot-2016-09-14-at-1-25-27-pm

As I launched into Reimagining Modern Hebrew Language Instruction, I saw my ‘students’ nodding their heads, finding the concepts to be quite intuitive, especially the moms in the room who had observed their own toddlers’ evolution to speaking.

The friendly breakfast and pre-training chit-chat had helped establish a cooperative tone for our first foray into story-asking.  My subjects were readily ushered into a short & silly Spanish demonstration-story about a princess who went from place to place looking for her beloved…chocolate.

We debriefed the strategies they observed, and ended the session by perusing my Novice Hebrew Corpus, so that my ‘students’ could see for themselves the wealth of Hebrew/English cognates available to exploit, not to mention the other hi-frequency target language.  I’ve found that providing teachers with a list of words – and this one is around 10 pages long! –  they’ll be using in class, can be an effective way to start rethinking curriculum!