All the other words that comprise the rest of the language besides the verbs need reps, of course, but we get them on the backs of verbs. It is the verbs that should sparkle and jump into the minds of the students even if the rest of the sentence doesn’t.
The verbs are the princess entering the ballroom, the other words are her servants, bowing along the curtained walls. The other words couldn’t be there without her. The verbs attract attention. They sparkle. They change unexpectedly and yet lose none of their strength and beauty when doing so. The other words in the sentence, the men, bowing along the walls, couldn’t even be in the room without the verb/princess being there.
The men bowing along the wall, to be clear, are not in the shadows. They are well-lit because the princess is there, casting light on everything that is happening in the sentence. As each of the men, the other words in the sentence, appear in each newly created sentence, they are allowed to stand up straight and be clearly seen. But they are not important – they can be removed, changed out, dismissed. The verb is the star of every sentence in any language.
What does this imply for us? Everything! We must learn to treat verbs with the respect and consideration they deserve in the language we speak in our classrooms. If we don’t set out to convey the sparkle, the importance and the attractiveness of each verb that we use in our lessons, then our students won’t be able to distinguish a man from a princess. How sad! They won’t see the other things in the room clearly – there won’t be any light. Everything will be dull, and our classrooms will start to resemble the sad classrooms of the last century, with no light in the students’ eyes, and sadness and confusion everywhere.
If we do not adequately present, and if we do not repeat the verb and repeat it again and repeat it even more times than we could ever feel comfortable doing in each class we teach, then we won’t be able to make comprehensible input really come alive in our classrooms.
It is no accident that TPRS classes feature one or two or three verbs/verbal structures to start off each class. And it is no surprise that verbs are the featured content of the growing amount of brand new and fresh scope and sequences documents being built in many districts in our country these days.
Gone are the horrid scope and sequence documents from the past, many of which were created from Tables of Contents of textbooks, without any justification in the research in the minds of our students, will remain dark, and the world to them will consist primarily of men, and then what would we do?
We will talk about exactly how to honor the light-filled beauty of the verb later in this discussion. Whether we succeed in our work with comprehensible input this year will depend completely on how much we can highlight the princesses of each sentence we say in each class all year long.