If the research shows us that acquisition occurs when the students are focused on meaning, and not on individual words, which raises Monitor activity and hence blocks the natural unconscious flow of input that alone results in authentic acquisition, then we must strive in our instruction to make the meaning of what we are saying clear, and not worry so much about making the individual words clear.
For example, requiring the kids to gesture activates the Monitor response. This jams the flow of meaning. Circling also jams the flow of meaning, because as soon as input becomes predictable it becomes boring. It is the same with targeting. (Circling and targeting are basically the same thing – circling is the expression of targeting in our instruction.)
Circling, targeting, and now we can add gesturing to the list, because they activate the Monitor and thus activate conscious thinking about the language, are suspect techniques. Anything that interrupts FLOW is suspect in this work. Search the word FLOW here in the search bar for some more articles on the supreme importance of FLOW in this work. Krashen talks about FLOW, but he doesn’t talk about it enough, because he has become too involved with just one way of teaching languages – TPRS.
The only exception to targeting individual words is of course in the first two weeks or so of level one, when individual words are the only thing the kids can understand. But when a language fabric begins to form in the students’ deeper minds, it’s time to let go of the desire to make everything clear to our students via circling and targeting and gesturing (because doing this activates the conscious mind which is the enemy of acquisition).
We should thus strive to just make ourselves clear to our students by delivering understandable messages (Bob Patrick’s term) while they focus on what we are actually saying, and not on the individual words we are using to make ourselves clear.