Dealing with short attention spans – a system

This post is about how I’m trying to deal with student boredom and lack of concentration in my TPRS classes.

I started off doing TPRS by playing it by ear: how long should I spend on a story? Should I do mostly PQA or dictation or reading, in what quantities, in what order?

Now I realize I need a system. I need to teach the students how to use these materials on their own. I’m gradually coming to use the following system:

1. PQA, focusing on a few key structures or vocab or both. I choose these from students’ writing in earlier classes.
2. a story. I keep this short and try to relate it to students.
3. I dictate the key sentences of the story we just created. (Apart from the repeated exposure for students, I get a written copy of the story and don’t have to rely on my memory.)
4. I hand out the handouts which have the mini-story on the front and the related extended reading on the back.
5. Students read the story. I will in future give them a time-limit, as the purpose is not just to comprehend but to comprehend quickly.
6. They fold the handout so they cannot see the text, only the pictures.
7. In pairs, they re-tell the story in 2 minutes. (The second partner must re-tell the story in the past-tense.)
8. We turn over the page and they read the extended reading. I discovered that a 2-minute time-limit is a little tight for the weaker students, but probably about right at this stage.
9. Blaine Ray‘s suggestion is to have students translate each paragraph. However, many of my classes do not have the patience or the concentration to stay with this at this stage of the lesson. So I cut to the chase by asking a few questions about the content, starting at the beginning and moving through each paragraph. Beforehand I have picked out certain key sentences and underlined them. Students translate these sentences into Japanese in writing.
10. (An additional variation is to then have students hide the text and translate their Japanese translations back into English, then check with the original.)
11. Homework is to read both mini-story and extended reading several times as quickly as they can until they can understand the content immediately. I give a test next week.
12. (Next week). The written test is either
    1. a list of written questions (the same kind of questions I asked in step 2 above) which they must answer in writing within a strict time limit, or
    2. questions given orally and to which they write the answers. That way I can control the speed. The idea is that, I believe they have trouble taking the material seriously because it looks so simple. My purpose is to increase their reading and comprehension speeds.
    3. In both cases, I let them keep the text in front of them. This is not a memory test.

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