Turkish Session Diary 13: Thou Shalt Mumble

I'd got funny looks when I demonstrated the sign for TQ Mumble with another group, so with this group I had so far shied away from explicitly suggesting it, although I had hinted at it in principle. However, the wiki article about it is quite right when it says:

Perfection is the enemy of accelerated learning. “Close enough” must be good enough. A lack of mistakes or awkwardness indicates a lack of improvement. Where there is action, there is exploration (and thus the discovery of some dead ends). 

I experienced this personally before with an audio course called Say Something in Welsh. As is usual with such audio courses it tests you by giving you an English word then waiting a few seconds for you to attempt it in Welsh before providing the correct equivalent. The most effective part of it was that the narrator made you promise to try something, anything, even if you knew full well it was wrong, as part of the learning process.

Why it works

This all comes back to language as a reflex and not knowledge. When you think too hard to try to dredge up knowledge you're not building a language skill at all, and there's the added downside that you're so emotionally invested in your attempt that being corrected feels like being told you're a failure.

But when you test a reflex, you don't think at all, you just say the first thing that comes into your head. Then when you're corrected it's not the end of the world, and more to the point what happens is that you compare what just came out of your mouth (however that happened) with the correct form. Before long it's coming out right.

How it worked for us

Now that we've got into the flow of role-playing setups, it occurred to me to work on this on our last session. I knew my learners were "thinking" too much, not least because in past weeks their continued frustration with Turkish conjugations had led them to nickname our WAYK sessions "the bloody endings lesson".

So although I avoided actually using the Mumble sign (there's a fine line between fun/innovative and infantile) and instead just explained that they should say the first thing that comes into their heads.

The first thing I noticed was that each round of play started to go much, much faster. Instead of me asking a question followed by 3 seconds of harrowed silence, a stilted response and a frustrated sigh when I corrected them, I would ask a question, they would respond almost immediately, I would correct them, they would go "Oh right OK", and we would move on. And it worked a charm for acquisition. Each round got faster and faster of its own accord.

Thou Shalt

Sometimes I see people ask what are the most fundamental techniques of WAYK. I've been told that when the new website is up and running the sprawling techniques wiki will be whittled down to the essentials. Aside from the obvious TQ Setup, TQ Obvious and so on, I'm fairly confident that TQ Mumble will make the cut. It really is a vital piece of the puzzle.

Turkish Session Diary 12: Full circle

All the way back in July I posted about my first epiphany with WAYK where I broke the mould of session patterns and started with genuine role-playing games. After that point I started to achieve some genuine acquisition instead of merely giving my students some glorified mnemonics.

I dubbed that post "Songs and games" by way of analogy to repetitious session patterns (songs) and goal-based interaction (games). However it just so happened that last week we spontaneously came up with a real song, which we tentatively named Ode to a Pen. It seemed like a good way to cement in the mind some rather complicated syntax and suffixes (original Turkish in bold, gloss in italic, English translation in regular):

You can even sing along if you like:

Bu	bir	kalem.
This	a	pen.
This is a pen.

Bu	benim	kalem-im.
This	my	pen-my.
This is my pen.

Kalem-im-i	ban-a	ver.
Pen-my-[object]	me-to	give.
Give me my pen.

Bu	bir	kalem.
This	a	pen.
This is a pen.

Bu	onun	kalem-i.
This	his/her	pen-his/her.
This is his/her pen.

Kalem-i-ni	o-na	ver.
Pen-his/her-[object]	s/he-to	give.
Give him/her his/her pen.

Bu	bir	kalem.
This	a	pen.
This is a pen.

Bu	senin	kalem-in.
This	your	pen-your.
This is your pen.

Kalem-in-i	…	al!
Pen-your-[object]		take!
Take your pen!

Before a "performance" we would say "Person A is singing to Person B, and we're all singing with Person A", and then between each verse Person B would perform the action.

I think it did quite a bit of good because they tell me they were all practising at home, but it was still a song, a set repetition, a glorified mnemonic. So in the next session, after reviewing the song, we played a role-playing game. Once again we had come full circle: the real magic was in the role-play.

Goal-Oriented Setups

Ultimately I have concluded that a TQ Setup that only makes meaning (the "what") TQ Obvious is nowhere near as effective as one that has a defined purpose (the "why"). I see TQ Silly Conversation as a nod to this problem that only goes halfway to a solution. True, getting everybody used to having aimless conversations about the objects in front of them is a great stepping stone to hunting, but it's no substitute for an actual goal or purpose.

So in my opinion role-play, the "why", is fundamental to setups in their most effective form. Back in July I wrote about two role-playing setups, Liar and Boss/Employee/Shopkeeper, that really helped speed things up in terms of actual acquisition and actual fluency as opposed to familiarity with a script or a song. Most recently we've been playing Lost and Found: "I've just found a bunch of phones and wallets/purses and I want to return them to their rightful owners, but I'm a bit simple and I can't even recognise my own things!" etc.

But what about hunting?

Yeah, about that. Although I am convinced that a skilled, motivated hunter will acquire language quickly, I'm not sure that it's the be-all and end-all. When you're out to revitalise a language by galvanising a group of youngsters to tap grandma's brain, sure, hunting is vital. But in a formal language teaching setting, it's a very difficult skill to impart quickly enough to count within the few fleeting hours you have before the end of the course.

What I am doing, though, is implementing the technique which I think isolates the "active ingredient", as it were, of hunting as respects language acquisition: TQ Just in Time. This derives from the observation that "Information and ability is acquired most deeply and rapidly at the moment of its greatest relevance."

So here's my current how-to for lesson planning:

1. Decide what vocabulary/grammar you want to cover, while of course observing TQ Limit.
2. Devise a role-playing setup/scenario where the learners are bound to need said vocabulary/grammar.
3. Explain the game in the students' native language.
4. Make them try to say what they want to say in the target language, then correct them when they get it wrong.

I used this last time to teach "to put in the bag" (çantaya koymak). The game was Where To Put It? (on the table, on the tissue, or in the bag?) and it was amazing to see how they never even asked what it meant in English. They just attempted "Put the pen in the bag", I supplied them with the correct sentence, we went round the table practising it, and all four of them were fluent in that bitesize piece in the space of 10 minutes.

The great thing about this setup is it gives students scope to hunt as much or as little as they want. If you've done it properly they should "need" the language you want them to learn today anyway, but if they want to get creative within the context of the role-play, they can. It's just up to you to keep an eye on the TQ Limit and especially TQ Full.

In summary, I think I can see a way to codifying an effective WAYK-based curriculum for formal language teaching, oriented around role-playing setups. In other words, I feel like I've reached the crest of the learning curve. But it's going to be a long way down the hill...

Turkish Session Diary 11: Supercharge setups with role-play

This week the learners decided they wanted to work on possessives. I was game.

For obviousness, I wanted to use the learners' personal objects, so before long I had their phones and purses/wallets (fortunately the same word in Turkish) out on the table. For a third class of objects I got three sugar sachets and wrote our names on them. In hindsight I could have used their keys. Imagine that, a Where Are Your Keys? practitioner not thinking to use keys...

We worked through the "Is this my phone? Yes this is your phone. Is this your phone? Yes this is my phone. Is this her phone? Yes this is her phone" routine with all the possible permutations, but before long I started to sense a descent into aimless repetition, disconnected somewhat from the actual meaning.

So once we had enough material I explained, in English, that we were now going to have a role play. "I've got everybody's stuff, and so now you need to find out who they all belong to and return them to their rightful owners." It worked like a charm.

Player: What's this?
Hoarder: This is a phone.
Player: Whose phone is this?
Hoarder: This is her phone.
Player: [Indignantly] Well, give her her phone!
Hoarder: OK OK!
Player: Whose phone is this?
Hoarder: [Sheepishly] This is your phone...
Player: [Indignantly] Give me my phone!

So I think when you've got learners who aren't quite into hunting yet, role-playing is a vital element in any set-up.

Turkish Session Diary 10: A hunting warm-up game

Ever since I had my first proper WAYK session with Arne I was convinced that its real power is unleashed in its "hunting" form. Its "pushing" form is very effective in itself, where the practitioner is the driving force. But it's when the learners are put in the driving seat and acquire the skill of "pulling" the language from the fluent speaker that it really becomes a supercharged engine of language acquisition.

In subsequent posts (Turkish Session Diaries 6, 7 and 8 and "On the art of hunting language") I pondered the question of how to help learners develop this skill. My attempts at explaining and demonstrating had only had limited success, but this week two things happened that gave me inspiration just in the nick of time.

The first was a Facebook post by Latin teacher Eric Mentges (private link) in which he explained how his "students worked in groups on forming an English set up based on a card they drew" after which "each group presented their set up and the others had to guess what they were going for" and they "then discussed which example ... was most obvious, what other possible interpretations there could be". This sort of thing sounded like just the ticket.

The second was last night when I played the Uno Pictionary card game with some friends. This is different from normal Pictionary in that there are no pens or paper involved, you have a selection of 20-odd small cards with different shapes, stick men, stick houses and so on. By using the cards in ingenious combinations together with a bit of miming you help your team mates to guess the word (see annoying ad). It occurred to me that exactly the same sort of ingenuity is required for language hunting, using limited vocabulary and a limited range of objects to help the fluent speaker provide the needed word.

Today we played a game in English with the following simple rules:

The hunter draws a card with a word on it. To enable the group to guess the word, he must use only the objects in the Set-up or others that are readily available. To begin with he can only use the words "What is this?", but he can reuse words used by the group as they guess. Miming is, of course, encouraged.

The Set-up was three glasses and a bottle of water. The words I started out with in the deck included "empty", "full", "drink", "thirsty", "pour", "spill", "taste" and "share". I first demonstrated and then the learners took turns, with some coaching from me. For the second round I got them to come up with some new words, and they came up with some imaginative options like "top", "tall", "round" and "drop".

Then I pretended not to speak any English, and got them to hunt the same words from me in Turkish. Pretty soon we ran up against some interesting quirks. For example, in Turkish if you describe someone as "big" or "small" you are referring to their age, and we describe tall people as "long" because there is no separate word. Ultimately it served to demonstrate the advantage of contextual, Set-up based learning instead of double-encoding meaning in both a first and a second language.

Of course the main thing was they were finally hunting!

Turkish Session Diary 9: Limit

I'm starting to realise that with WAYK, lesson plans are never more than a blueprint. Once you've got that spark going things always turn out differently, but in a good way.

Last week we had decided that we would like to know how to call the emergency services. So I came up with a Target Conversation between a caller who's seen a burglar, and a police officer. It was a perfectly decent target conversation. I also had material ready for calling an ambulance after a fall, but that turned out not to be needed.

Instead of the stodgy four-line TQ Imaginary Friend routines followed by taking turns around the table, which had been my method until recently, I thought it might be better to just start with a Bitesize Piece, play with it, and go from there.

I had a playing card-sized clipart silhouette of a burglar, and put it in the centre of the table. "Hırsız var!" (There's a thief about!) I said, and then pinched one of my learners' bottle of water. It was great fun and we quickly recycled material we'd already used, "I'm a thief!" "You're a thief!" "Liar! I'm not a thief you're a thief!" "Catch the thief!" and so on.

Combined with the bag from last week, everything could have spiralled out of control if I hadn't been conscious of the need to rein everything back in to a Target Conversation that we would be able to practise.

The final Target Conversation was a role-play involving a Police Captain, Police Officer, Thief, and Witness(es). The Thief would start by "stealing" some of the objects from the middle of the table, and the Witnesses would alert the Police Captain. The Police Captain would order the Police Officer to catch the Thief, and then ask the Police Officer to check the contents of the bag to see what the Thief had stolen. Incidentally it turned out to be our first foray into past tenses ("What did the thief steal?", "The thief stole ...")

I am happy with how things went this week because:

• Everybody spent most of their time speaking Turkish, with very little reversion to English
• Everybody knew what they were saying and why they were saying it at all times,
• At no point did I feel that anyone got bored with the repetition

My only gripe is that I didn't use TQ Limit enough. I had seriously maxed everyone out by the end, but we all had a good laugh and I think that made all the difference.

Turkish Session Diary 7: How do we say that?

Just back from this week's session (last week's was postponed to Friday, which is why the next session came around so quickly).

This week we went straight in with the buying-selling role-play, but at first we just had a review round. I had the learner to my right start by asking me how much for a pen. She declared my price "çok pahalı!" (too expensive), and haggled me down a bit before buying it. This yielded a "ride" of sorts, which we repeated three times and then passed around the table.

Then we came back to the idea of "pulling" language in day-to-day conversation with Turkish speakers, although in the context of our session they would be pulling the language from me. First I asked what else we might want to ask about a product besides its being expensive or cheap. We decided we were going to find out how to ask about "quality", "life" in the case of batteries and so on, and whether or not it has a "guarantee".

For "quality" we talked about how we might make it clear to someone that we were talking about quality so they would know to give us the word. We discussed that we might ask if it was "good", and also make gestures such as flicking and "trying" to bend the pen. I had the learner to the left of me try this, and I gave her the word kalite. As it turned out, we ended up learning two words: kalite, the noun "quality", and kaliteli, the adjective meaning "of good quality".

For "life" or "lifetime", we tried to practise saying something as best we could with incomplete Turkish, so the other person knows what we are trying to say, and then saying Nasıl deriz? (How do we say that?). I wasn't very good at getting the idea across, so the learner to the left of me would start the conversation, ask me "How long can I use this for?" and so on, but then forget to say Nasıl deriz? at the critical moment. But still, they got the idea so I'm hoping this will work better next time. (The Turkish for "guarantee", garanti, came out all by itself as this particular learner already knew it.)

We worked Craig's Lists into the session for the first time yet with this group. Off-the-cuff I set one up to simultaneously cover vocabulary and Turkish's dual genitive-possessive construction: uzunluk (length), genişlik (width), bunun uzunluğu (this [thing]'s length), bunun genişliği (this [thing]'s width).

To next time!

Turkish Session Diary 4: Time flies...

So, here we are 11 weeks in and they're still coming back for more.

While no session ever goes exactly the way I planned it, I have been able to cover some key grammatical concepts that some foreigners take years to master, if they ever do, such as the definite accusative (thinking of it as "the" as some do creates more problems than it solves) and descriptive adjectives ("Is your money existent?" instead of "Have you got any money?").

An innovation that seems to be working well so far is clock cards. At the moment I'm using 12 cards, one for each hour on the clock. So far I've only really used it to teach "How many hours later?" and so on, but it's going to be my springboard into tenses, "When will you...", "When did you..." and so on. Only problem is, if I forget to put something on them when I'm not using them they're liable to blow away! Time flies, as they say...

My session pattern is working well, providing a structure for me to introduce new information at a balanced rate. What I want to work on now is freer and more personalised practice sections. I'll look for the TQ's that describe what I'm talking about more eloquently, but there are two ideas I'm working on: Firstly having a "free practice" bit just before a break or the end of the session where I start them off with a combination of material we've already worked on and tell them to play with it (I've already done this with some success), and secondly use some constructions from the session to talk about things in day-to-day life.

As always, a work in progress. Enjoy this clip from today:

Admittedly, this is not the best video I could have gotten but it gives you an idea of what's going on. They had a bit of trouble with "In 3 hours" (üç saat sonra) and "At 3 o'clock" (saat üçte), but that was because we had been working on üç saat sonra in previous sessions. Still, it wasn't long before they were back into the groove. You can also see the clock cards in action here.

We're back...

It's been a while, but I'm pleased to report that Fethiye WAYK is back.

I've started with two weekly Turkish sessions, and Gözde did some English sessions with adults just before the tourism season began, and is continuing with some children's sessions.

In the Turkish side, I have restructured the curriculum somewhat by eliminating suffixes to begin with.

Our opening conversation now goes as follows:

1. Bu ne?	What is this?
2. Bu, siyah kalem.	This is a black pen.
1. Bu siyah kalem kimin?	Whose is this black pen?
2. Bu siyah kalem benim.	This black pen is mine.
1. Ha, bu siyah kalem senin mi?	Ah, is this black pen yours?
2. Evet, bu siyah kalem benim.	Yes, this black pen is mine.
1. Hm, bu siyah kalem benim mi?	Hmm, is this black pen mine?
2. Hayır, bu siyah kalem senin değil benim.	No, this black pen is not yours, but mine.

Suffixes are going to be bite-sized pieces introduced by themselves, and only when everything else up to that point has been mastered.

So that's a little taster. I'll be sure to keep you posted as we progress.

Fethiye WAYK begins in English

Our Turkish sessions have taken somewhat of a break through a mixture of cancellations and illness. But the English side of things, run mostly by my wife Gözde, is going from strength to strength, already halfway through the USC with two separate groups. Hopefully we'll have some video for you soon.

We're talking about how to move further beyond the USC. With tourism/service industries the big thing around here, most likely our vocabulary and set-ups will expand in that general direction as we build up the grammar.

Below is a translation of Gözde's first post on the blog, reflecting her impressions:

After researching WAYK for some time with my husband, I started to believe that WAYK could be effective in light of points that overlap with principles of language acquisition that we are taught as English teachers. I talked about the method with some adult students who wanted to learn English and so we decided to give it a try. Although there is a business side to it, this is a secondary consideration in our experimental group project.

Our first English lessons

One of my first points of hesitation with WAYK, which we had actually seen in the case of foreigners learning Turkish, was the possibility of adult groups not being enthusiastic about using sign language. But right from the first lesson there was no hesitation, even by shy students. Our first lesson followed the Universal Speed Curriculum. At the end of the lesson they were conversing without the signs, even one of them who we could say was encountering English for the first time.

The strongest aspect of WAYK that I have observed is that it keeps students' motivation at a high level. At this point I can identify two reasons: the game aspect for children, and for adults the fact that they can speak English from the first lesson.

As for developing the curriculum, at the moment I have only used sign language with the beginners' classes but I have used WAYK principles with a 10th grade student and found it to be useful in getting her to use grammar she learnt at school. My husband has also used WAYK with an 11th grade student to great effect.

WAYK's edge

Although the sign language makes WAYK different to classic techniques, this is not the basis of WAYK. Essentially, we find in WAYK the ideal language teaching methods taught in education faculties, in particular teaching without using the student's mother tongue, creating set-ups, and using lots of repetition.

The biggest difference between WAYK and classic methods is that there are no explanations of grammar, just as when children learn language. Logically there is no need to explain something again when the brain has already learnt it, only prospective English teachers really need to know this. Those who only wish to speak English do not need to know what a structure or rule is called.

Many teachers will have observed the gap between what we are taught in university and what we are able to apply in a class environment. From this perspective we can say that WAYK is a package programme that enables us to apply ideal teaching methods.

These are my impressions so far, I will write more after upcoming lessons...

WAYK nedir?

Açılımı "Where Are Your Keys?" (Anahtarların Nerede?) olan WAYK, akıcı şekilde konuşturmayı amaçlayan bir dil öğretme sistemidir. Onu geliştirenin amacı, herhangi bir dil öğretme metodunu geliştirmekten ziyade unutulmaya yüz tutmuş dilleri yeniden canlandırmaktır. Bu hem başarısının sırrıdır hem de şimdiye dek geniş çapta duyulmamış olmasının sebebidir.

Herhangi bir hizmetin ya da ürünün "başarılı" olması için rakiplerinden daha iyi olması değil, daha iyi pazarlanması önemlidir. Bu her sektörde olduğu gibi dil öğreniminde de geçerlidir. Öte yandan WAYK için cazip reklamlarla öğrenci kandırmak, olmayınca da "daha çok çalışsaydınız olurdu" demek gibi bir seçenek söz konusu değil; somut bir soruna somut bir çözüm getirmeyi amaçlıyor. Sorunu çözmeli yoksa devam etmesinin bir anlamı yoktur.

Peki bu kadar başarılıysa neden bilinmiyor? Amerika Yerlilerinin dillerini korumasına yardım etmek değerli bir amaç olsa da "ana akımın" çok dışındadır, üstelik ticari menfaat da sağlamaz. Maalesef parayla dönen bir dünyada yaşıyoruz. Asil amaçlarla başarılanlar ise uzun süre keşfedilmemiş kalabiliyor.

Peki WAYK'ın sırrı nedir? Bu sorunun cevabı şu soruda gizli: Dilleri en iyi kim öğrenir? Çocuklar. Peki çocuklar tüm gün ne yapar? Oyun oynarlar. Nasıl bu kadar kolay dil öğrendiklerine şaşırıyoruz. Hiçbir gramer kuralı izah edilmeden veya kelime listeleri ezberletilmeden güle oynaya konuşmayı öğreniyorlar. WAYK'ın biraz da çıkış noktası bu. Ders okutulmaz, oyun oynanır. Hiçbir şey izah edilmez, doğrusu buna gerek kalmaz. Temel "oyun kuralları" ve biraz da işaret dili kullanılarak kelimeler ve gramer esasları beyne deyim yerindeyse "çaktırılıyor". Yapılan hatalar oyunun tadı tuzu gibi geçiştiriliyor ve çok geçmeden öğrenciler, doğrusu "oyun arkadaşları", strese telaşa girmeden akıcı şekilde konuşmaya başlıyor.

Fethiye WAYK olarak naçizane şekilde WAYK sistemini klasik bir dil kursuna dönüştürmeyi hedefliyoruz. Bu blogta ise yolculuğumuzu belgeliyoruz. Yabancılar için Türkçe kursu ile başlayıp, Türkler için İngilizce kursu da geliştirmeyi umuyoruz. Bu esnada çoğu yazımızı İngilizce yazsak da Türkçe olarak da sizi bilgilendirmeyi ihmal etmeyeceğiz.

Damlaya damlaya göl olur derler...

Turkish Session Diary 1

Today we had our third formal session with our first student, and two more joined us for the first time. All three have some Turkish vocabulary, so they're not starting from scratch. Still, getting used to signing and speaking at the same time is proving difficult. I've assured them that the signs will both fix the words in their memories and help them to truly grasp the grammar, and they're still with me so far. As the signs started to sink in I think they could see a way to them being helpful.

I've uploaded a video to Youtube of the Mine/Yours part of the lesson. They weren't so keen on me filming them, but they didn't mind so long as I filmed myself.

I am still feeling my way with introducing new material and making it digestible for newcomers, but they've been very patient with me and I am improving. One of the main things I keep having to remind myself to do is slow down with the signs, which is somewhat difficult when you're signing suffixes. But I'm sure it will work out. Our third-time student was as active as I was in persuading the newcomers that they would get used to the system and find it helpful.

So that's Parts 1-3 of the USC in a single two-hour session, but of course that's with people who already have a decent vocabulary. Still not bad!

Edit: Please see my next post.

Turkish USC

So, a couple more links are finished on the chain on the wiki, simultaneously laying the groundwork for the Fethiye WAYK Turkish Curriculum while also making a start on entering our first Ride, which is our version of the Universal Speed Curriculum.

I have worked out a format that I hope any teacher will be able to use "out of the box" as it were. It starts by declaring the Set-up (which I am also going to index), and the Craig's Lists and Fairies' Lists used. You'll notice that each item in the list links to its entry in the Vocabulary Master List.

Then the Conversation is broken down into "links" which are then put back together again in the form of "chains". I was finding that I had to stop and think about which bits we would do next in mid-session, so the Conversation Chains are to save me that hassle.

More of the USC has been playtested than I have entered; we finished Part 2 just this weekend with our students. We have the rest planned, but I want to playtest it and then enter it onto the wiki. If there's a need I will also release it in PDF format.

Curriculum page created

OK, so I've created a "Fethiye WAYK Turkish Curriculum" page over on the official WAYK wiki, which the administrator was kind enough to give me access too. Little did he know...

Once I've got my head back round about how wikis work I'm going to be structuring the information as follows:

• Vocabulary Master List (V)
• Craig's Lists (CL)
• Grammar Master List (G)
• Fairies' Lists (FL)
• Rides (R)
• Ride Chains (RC)
• Ride Map (RM)
• Set-ups (S)

This is going to be quite detailed, so you can skip to the bottom line if you like.

I'm going to be basing the Vocabulary Master List on the list of 1,200 most commonly used words in Turkish, to which I will add any other words that we use that aren't on it. This is the only thing that will be anywhere near finished as we start. Each entry will refer to videos of the signs that we will use. To make things simple, I'm going to take videos of myself or Gözde signing several words together, and then the links will be to the point in the video where that word is being signed. The Vocabulary Master List will be a single wiki page, likely a table.

The Grammar Master List will include not only particles, suffixes, and so on, but also "concepts" and specific sentence constructions, basically any "new" element that the setup will be designed to help "click" in players' minds. 

Now with Craig's Lists... I know that I'm deviating slightly from orthodoxy here, but I want to take Craig's Lists beyond a memory/repetition tool that you use only for some words, and even then only when needed to jog the memory, and use this concept to organise and categorise the entire Vocabulary. These CLs will still be designed such that they could be used in-session (actually, I think they may work well for refreshers), but this will be up to the teacher. Much of the time they will simply be words that are introduced and/or used together and/or in the same context, put together in a group that's easier to categorise and track. Each Craig's List will be a separate wiki page, likely a table.

Fairies' Lists are basically Craig's Lists, just applied to the Grammar Master List. Of course, at no point in the session will we be reviewing lists of suffixes. Again, this will be a device more geared to helping us teachers develop sessions.

Rides will each be individual pages, almost like recipes, listing the a Set-up and a Script together with the Craig's Lists and Fairies' Lists used. Ride Chains will be still other pages listing sequences of interconnected Rides. The Ride Map will be a single page organising all Ride Chains into a network that will enable teachers to see the big picture and follow students' progress. Teachers will be able to pick and choose Rides and Ride Chains for each session depending on the class. 

The Set-ups used in Rides will also be documented and tracked on separate pages. I anticipate that coming up with new, TQ Obvious Set-ups will be the toughest challenge we face, especially as we progress to more complex grammar and extended vocabulary.

All of the above elements will have a reference code. Each word will be "V 123" or some such, Craig's Lists will be "CL 1", "CL 2" and so on, with each entry in the list given a number, "1.1, 1.2" etc. The same sort of thing will go for Rides and Ride Chains; variants of Set-ups will also be numbered in this way. This will mean that the Vocabulary Master List, say, will have links after each word to each Craig's List and Ride it appears in. Everything will be cross-referenced as much possible.

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The bottom line: Apart from the Vocabulary Master List and maybe some of the Grammar Master List, everything else will be built up week by week as we go along. Once we've finished, we will have a well-rounded package so we can go up to anyone and say "I can get you from nothing to intermediate in [however many weeks]." Other teachers will be able to simply use the Rides, Craig's Lists and Ride Map out-of-the-box to plan sessions, while using the Vocabulary Master List as a dictionary, particularly to learn the signs. The rest of the behind-the-scenes infrastructure will serve as a template to fellow WAYK practitioners in adapting it to their own languages. Particularly in the area of Set-ups will we be able to swap ideas.

This has been good to get my ideas down in writing, so now I'm going to go off and develop some of it so there's something to look at. Meanwhile, any thoughts, suggestions, corrections and reactions will be most welcome.

Resources

The other day I found a real gem: "The Most Commonly Used 1,200 Words in Turkish to Be Taught to Children Aged 0-6", which, of course, is in Turkish although there is an English abstract. My game plan at the moment is to build up a course that includes all these words, then the idea is we'll have a tangible end result, a package, to offer prospective students.

Another online resource that I'm sure we will be referring to often is the "Spread the Sign" international sign language dictionary. As an agglutinative language (suffixes galore) Turkish bears little relation to Turkish Sign Language, and the logic behind some signs is only apparent to those who already speak Turkish. For instance, for "need" you sign the letter "l" in lazım (you can check on the site). How imaginative. We'll be going with the Indian one, which is much more expressive.

Getting started

Hello World!

My name is Joel Thomas and together with my wife Gözde we're embarking on a project here in Fethiye, Turkey, of applying the Where Are Your Keys (WAYK) language fluency training methods and their derivatives to mainstream language teaching. Specifically, this blog will be a way for me to document the journey as we develop and document a curriculum/syllabus with specific vocabulary and grammar mastery goals in mind.

We had our first formal session today, and so far so good. Getting people to TQ Copycat is an uphill struggle at the beginning, but the more people you have doing it together the less silly they feel.

We haven't even got through the Universal Speed Curriculum yet. I mean, we have a draft translation but we haven't actually play-tested it all yet. A strict translation requires several times more new grammar than the equivalent English, so in line with TQ Limit there will be modifications. As and when we've play-tested it all I'll be uploading it to the wiki, and then we'll go from there.

So, that'll be all for now...

PS: I've been posting some on the WAYK and LH Google groups already, and in a way they form the background to this blog. For anyone who's interested in giving advice and would like to see some of my thoughts up to this point, please see the following chronological list:

WAYK for agglutinative languages
Explaining fairies: Why a joke isn't funny when you have to explain it
Hi from Turkey
Syllabus framework