Our purpose in this game of teaching comprehensible input is to teach the structures. We focus more on them than on the content of the story or the PQA. Content is merely secondary to the CI process – the structures are everything.
The content of the PQA or the story is merely a delivery device for the structure. When we do PQA or a story, we are tricking the minds of our students into focusing on the discussion or the facts of the story when in fact we are secretly embedding in every single sentence we say a structure that is the real purpose of the story so that later, in sleep, that structure can be integregated via all the repetitions of it that day in class into the language system, which is unconscious.
When content is secondary to the structures as we roll along in L2, the structures are genuinely acquired because they are repeated from 75 to 100 times each class period in a meaningful contextual framework. This holds the conscious interest of the students while the unconscious mind works unnoticed, doing the actual acquisition of the language, at the rate of 2 or 3 structures per day, but with exponential growth over time.
After class, when the students sleep each night, the structures are woven into the fabric of the deeper mind in a magnificent process. The teacher has very little to do with it, merely delivering the CI each day. We drive delivery trucks. The deeper mind builds the house.
And, because it is out of conscious control, it is assured. Instruction via properly done CI is guaranteed. It won’t be forgotton. Keeping it out of conscious control and away from prying hands is something nature does if the thing to be accomplished is really important, like the propagation of the species or the growing of a forest.
And like acquiring a language. We have just screwed it all up by thinking that we are so important that we could teach a language via conscious means. We are not that capable and we are certainly not that important – we just drive the trucks. Let’s just turn it all over to our students’ deeper minds and be glad that all we have to do is drive the trucks.
Over time, in this overarchingly beautiful process that is so freely given, we just present and get repetitions on those few structures, a few more each day, and our students move rapidly towards fluency as the unconscious process works unknown to anybody.
Again, the story line serves merely as a vehicle for the vast amounts of repetitions of the structures. Authentic acquisition of the language is thus a completely unconscious process, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/07/18/we-learn-languages-unconsciously-2/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/07/19/we-learn-languages-unconsciously/
The PQA discussion and the story, that time spent in class in that back and forth lighthearted spinning of fantastic images, represent the banks of the river, as it were. They are not the target. The water, the three structures, rivers of it, are the target. So we focus on the water, and not on the banks of the river.
Let it rain:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/07/19/learning-a-language-is-an-unconscious-process-3/