I got a question about TPRS asking where the number of 75 repetitions per structure may have come from. Here is an answer that may or may not be accurate:
Carol Gaab has said that she has a goal of 75 repetitions for simple structures and up to 150 for more complex structures. Wow. If an expert at that level says that, then we need to listen. I have also heard Susie say 70-170 are good numbers and, when I asked her where she got it, she said, (typically Susie so honest) “I made it up.”
So maybe that number just kind of got decided on. I doubt that a formal study was done – who needs it? We learn best by teaching, not researching. It matters little – the thing to impress upon new people is how those repetitions keep an entire lesson narrow and deep and lead to real acquisition as opposed to shallow and wide instruction that does not lead to real acquisition.
The mistake is to do about 25 reps (which already feels like a lot!) and then think that it has been enough and to go somewhere else in the CI. This is typically done and is something we all need to really pay attention to. In all honesty, I think that we all would agree that it would take a wizard to get over a hundred reps on a structure in a regular 50 minute class, but at least we can try.
When we hear ourselves really cranking out mega reps on a structure in a class and the class is interesting and moving and the hand comprehension checks are above 8, and the kids’ eyes are registering good decoding, then we gain confidence because we know that our students are definitely acquiring the language via the repetition. In a 90 minute class getting those high numbers would not be too much of a challenge.
It is a very funny feeling because you have to make it interesting and at the same time you have to stay on the structure until at least 50 (I know that is a low number but, for me, it is a huge challenge just to get 50), while then going to the next structure and still keeping things interesting.
It feels awkward as you work your way through a lesson that way, but it is like riding a bike, it does become familiar and I have written on this blog and in my books about how the three structures form a kind of girding system like the hurricane rods – big bolts that run the length of each floor – in Charleston, SC that hold those old buildings together in bad weather, if you have seen those. So you stay on the circling of the structure and then you go to the second and then the third and it is like they form the very frame of the story.
Therefore, even now after all these years, I ask kids to count, three kids each count one structure and when I get up to 50 I ask them to signal me – they love to count by the way – and then I know I can go to the next thing.
No one in a training should miss the fact that you need to repeat the three structures, which bring balance and safety to the story via circling, along with SLOW and, occasionally, Point and Pause. This for me has been the big relearning of the past year when I do a story – the idea that really we are not teaching a story but are repeating structures under the guise of telling a story.
Therefore we don’t want to introduce too many new structures during the CI, as I got into these past few years. I became very enamored of the Point and Pause skill, and it is a great skill, but it should not be allowed to take us away from the three structures.
If Point and Pause causes us to divert from the main structures, that is very bad in the sense that the students CANNOT REMEMBER all of those new things that we bring in via Point and Pause, which is why Carol says that she sometimes goes over a hundred reps!
The point is clear – the structues, not the story, are the goal of the class. It is the conscious identifying of the structures during the story that allows the rest of the words in the story to be kind of absorbed, if that makes sense.
Krashen has suggested that we learn languages unconsciously, and, in that light, it is the conscious identification/translation by the students’ brains of the three structures, functioning like islands in the sea of unconscious “soup” around them, that brings about the almost miraculous process of language acquisition via CI.