Comprehensible input takes four forms in my classroom:
1. PQA – this means that we use Circing to talk with the kids. There are no key structures (guideposts), as there are with stories. The target structures come randomly from the information given to us by the kids, as in the Circling with Balls activity (see the resources page of this site, click on “ben slavic workhop handouts”). PQA may be the hardest aspect of delivering comprehensible input, because it is random, but if the instructor is willing to let go of the side of the pool and swim about a bit in the language, it can be most rewarding.
2. Stories – we focus – in the PQA – on three structures that we want to get enough repetitions on so that the story is easy to understand. The more we PQA those structures, the easier it is for our students to understand. I have chosen to PQA three structures all day on Monday and I still feel that my students could benefit from even more than those hundredes of reps gained on Monday. PQA aimed at stories brings more comprehension – setting up a story and doing a story is less random than the PQA described in (1) above. Therefore, there is less fear in doing stories because the story script guides us safely through the lesson as explained in the Conclusions and Sample Stories at the end of TPRS in a Year!.
3. Backwards Planning from a piece of literature or music (any text that we want to teach, really – it could be jokes, as Bryce Hedstrom showed us at NTPRS) – we take a targeted text that is not a story and we try as hard as we can to circle and get repetitions on as many structures in the target poem, etc. as possible. Thus armed, when the kids go to hear or read the poem, they are able to recognize a lot of the structures and a whole new world – French pop music, for example -opens up to their eyes instantly. Backwards planning can be used in level one classes, but my suggestion is to save it for higher level classes.
The point about all three of these methods of delivering comprehensible input to our students is that all we have to do is have something that we actually want to share with our kids and then get multiple repetitions, hundreds if possible, on that something’s main structures.
In PQA we get repetitions on what they tell us, in stories we get repetitions on the target structures provided in the story script, and in backwards planning (the most difficult to do because there are so many structures that need to be repeated in even a short poem, we get repetitions on the published target text.
We take structures, we circle them enough so that the kids can decipher their meaning instantly when they hear it later, and those repetitions, once they have been repeated enough, turn into comrehensible inut in the three forms listed above.
4. Reading. Our students should be reading 50% of the time in a classroom. Reading as comprehensible input is the logical outcome of the three kinds of listening comprehensible input listed above. Once the listening has been done, it would be a waste to not read about what was discussed in the previous days, since we just went to all that effort to establish sound identification in our students’ minds for whatever our target structures were. I believe that kids can read only because they can understand the spoken language first, as per the Sesame Street model.
In PQA and stories, we write up what the kids gave us (in my case from notes taken by a superstar in class during the discussion). In backwardly planned pieces of literature or music, we have the reading right there, the object of days of circling the structures contained in it.
Reading, though it must follow (as per the above) listening comprehensible input sequentially in weekly lesson plans, it is no less important than PQA, stories and backwards planning. How valuable is one glove when we have two hands?
Both listening comprehensible input and reading are input skills, so the student need do nothing but enjoy processing the sounds of the langauge in class for a few years before the output emerges naturally at different times in each student. The output skills of writing and listening should therefore be introduced far later than the four input skills described herein.