Embedded Stories

There have so often been stories I wanted my students to read that were simply above their heads. The most recent example is Catullus' carmen V. It's a lovely poem, and the concepts are really pretty simple, and I spent a day or two teaching them some of the the vocabulary they were about to run into, but it's poetry, so the phrasing is hard and, sometimes, keeping the flow of it is hard.

One of the answers to that is embedded readings. Michele Whaley and Laurie Clarcq are the creators and goddesses of this technique. Essentially, it means creating several versions of a text to scaffold it so that students work up to understanding the original. It allows you to work up to new vocabulary with explanations, synonyms and scene-setting so you end up with very little glossing and very little reverting to L1. The first version should be simple enough that they should understand it easily with no questions.



The second version works from the groundwork in version one to build up closer to the original, and so forth.

For example (this was for my Latin III class), the original line is vivamus, mea Lesbia, et amemus. The line uses a present subjunctive to get across the concept of let's do this, and while my threes have learned that, they weren't going to immediately understand the suggestion as opposed to just a statement that they were doing it. So the first version I gave them was:

O mea Lesbia, volo nos vivere et amare. They understand from this that Lesbia is a person (and I asked them anyway, just in case), and that the speaker (whom I identified as the poet) wants them to do something. This is much more basic language, and they understand now that it's something he wants, not something that's happening.

The next version was Lesbia, debemus vivere et amare. Now they know we should do that.

Then: utinam vivamus et amemus. They know utinam to be, more or less, oh if only. It also brings the subjunctive back in, so when they see it in a second, it won't smack them so hard.

Then: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, et amemus. I can ask them the questions I asked them on the first version, and they can still answer them. That said, I guarantee that if I'd shown them this first, those questions would not have elicited reasonable responses.

Being the twitchily specific person I am, I color-coded phrases I knew were going to change but mean each other. Volo, debemus, utinam et finally, vivamus et amemus, were all the same color, so they knew those things all meant each other.

I can do this with an entire story, too, in a block, rather than line by line. First:

determine what the main idea of the story is, and write that out simply first. That can easily be your first reading - three or four sentences that introduce the basic ideas.

The next reading throws in more details and ramps up the passage that they've already read, because they already know the plot there.

Then the next level adds some more things and continues to rearrange what they've already read, because they already know what it says.

We continue to do this until they reach the original. Some texts need a lot more embedding than do others. Some need two versions. Some need five. Sometimes you decide there's really no worth in getting them all the way to the original because you can teach what you need to with the embedded, so you stick with that. Maybe you employ the Where Are Your Keys technique of 'same song, second verse' (or whatever Evan calls it - I can't remember) and you have your ones and your fours reading the same thing because the ones read a heavily embedded version, and then they read it again the next year, and so forth until they're finally reading the original in their fourth year.

When there's a surprise ending, I like to leave it off all the embedded versions and just throw it in at the end, because that way it isn't spoiled. You simply have to make sure that it's readable enough for the kids.

A good rule of thumb is that if something has ninety percent vocabulary that the kids already know, they should be able to read it. If it has less than that, it will be much harder to read. Scaffolding like this - embedding texts - makes creating readable texts a lot easier.

The one thing we have to be aware of is this: language is culture, and reading is a highly cultural activity. I.e. without lingual culture, reading isn't possible. When we embed, we have to be very aware so that we don't accidentally remove important culture (and not just social culture) from the reading itself. That's detrimental rather than helpful.