Hello hello!
As some of you know, I was a high school Spanish teacher in the past, annnd when I was a teacher I used this method called Teaching Proficiency Through Reading & Storytelling (TPRS). It’s based on providing students with a large amount of comprehensible input. A lot of the technique revolves around asking your students for story details, and then circling each detail in a repetitive way by asking lots of questions, so as to really give the brain a lot of opportunity to decode the language.
Here on the forums, I thought it’d be fun to create a series of readings called “猫のノミ” to demonstrate the core “circling” piece, and to see if anyone is interested in this kind of content. This post will describe how the method works, and then the second post will be where I’ll link to readings I create as I post them.
Before getting into the method, one caveat I want to give is that I am not a native speaker of Japanese, and thus I’m sure my stories and questions will have errors. Please, if you see an error, or if you feel like something could be worded more naturally, don’t hesitate to let me know! I’ll correct it and give you credit :D! If there’s enough interest, I’d like to turn these stories into videos, or maybe even an interactive app, so having the Japanese be as correct as possible is really important to me!
The circling method
Circling was an innovation created by Susan Gross, and is a big part of the TPRS method. Here’s how circling works. Let’s say you have the following sentence:
ねこはノミちゃんだ。
To get a lot of repetitions of that sentence’s structures, you would ask a series of circling questions, and students would answer these questions with short phrases. You’d then re-state the answer in a complete sentence. For example:
- ねこはノミちゃんだ？
- They say: はい！
- You say: はい、ねこはノミちゃんだ。
- ねこはノミちゃんだ？いぬはノミちゃんだ？
- They say: ねこ！
- You say: はい、いぬはノミちゃんじゃない。ねこはノミちゃんだ。
- いぬはノミちゃんだ？
- ノミちゃんはなに？
- ねこはみちこだ？
- ねこはノミちゃんだ？ねこはみちこだ？
- ねこはだれ？
When you add another sentence, you can get even more repetitions, etc, giving their brains that sweet input it needs to acquire the language.
If you have additional questions about the circling technique, let me know! Otherwise, I hope you enjoy my readings. Again, if you notice any errors in my Japanese, don’t hesitate to correct me 
. & thanks for reading this long post!
) in English it makes sense to ask something like: “Is the cat or the dog Nomi-chan?” with the answer being (based on the context of the reading): “the cat”.