The Importance of PQA

Here's an insight that took me a long time to realize:

Students acquire structures during PQA.  It's easy to "go through the motions" with PQA and move straight into the storytelling (that's what TPR Storytelling is all about, isn't it?), thinking the students will learn the structures as long as you use them and circle them enough within the stories.  However, the stories work best when they're seen more as the application of material already learned through PQA.  Previously, I've primarily focused on the stories and the result was that, while students could tell stories and personalize them, they still couldn't communicate with one another through asking and responding to questions in a conversation format (they also didn't know the structures as well as I wanted them to, which is related but wasn't my main concern.  I was most concerned that, even though they knew all this Spanish, they couldn't carry on a conversation!).  I thought that they would learn the "yo" and "tú" forms through my dialogue with characters during the story but later realized that, if I was doing PQA effectively, they would recognize all the conjugation patterns to some extent before we even got to the story.  Moreover, that's why parallel characters are important - they arise through PQA and we're able to see the same structures in many different ways through the development and description of the parallel characters.  It's a Bloom's Taxonomy-like principle: First the students hear the same fairly isolated structure the same way in the same context (establishing meaning through translating and possibly TPR), then in different ways in the same context while still semi-isolated (circling), then different ways in different context and still semi-isolated (parallel characters, and, finally, in different ways in changing contexts (during the story).

One of my goals this year is to make sure I have my students solid at each step before proceeding to the next step - in other words, I need to make sure my students have the PQA phase of a lesson down before venturing into the storytelling phase.  In fact, I'll be setting aside an entire day for PQA now - it'll be interesting to see the results!