The fewer the new words, the greater will our students be able to focus on the meaning of the story (the overall concrete) rather than being forced to worry about a bunch of new sounds, the individual words/rocks that make up the concrete.
This is in keeping with what Krashen says to do – make the process of learning a language a largely effortless, largely unconscious process. About all that is required is that the language be presented in a way that the learner feel the opposite of anxious and that the content be interesting to her.
All the output will come later. It is absolutely true that we learn languages by absorbing them unconsciously first – without analysis. We must continue in our CI instruction to put our students’ focus on the forest and not on the individual trees. We focus on the building and not on the rocks that make it up.
Comprehensible input is a natural process. To repeat: comprehensible input is a natural process. The conscious decoding of individual words is not necessary – in fact it works against everything. Their meaning becomes clear within a context of chunks of sound, not individual words. The beauty is in the larger thing, the forest, the building, the story, its meaning.
The target structures, the rebar rods, play their role. They allow the power of the deeper mind to decode the message. In one class period the mind could not decode fifty target structures, rebar rods, any more than the concrete could hold fifty rebar rods – they would overload the structure in the same way too many target structures would overload the power of the mind to decode all that sound into meaning.
It is crazy to try to teach a language by focusing on rocks/individual words.
Pleasing themes/leitmotifs/fugal structures in music function in much the same way as the three structures function in our stories. But I never saw Beethoven put a whole shitload of themes in, for example, the Pastoral Symphony.
He just used one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM8RlCZP0KQ. Just one little melody but he made it reach to the stars. If he had focused on one note the Pastoral Symphony would have sounded like Chopsticks.
The structures, whether we use one or two or three, are the secret to PQA. Many of my colleagues have told me they are down to two. How easy it is then, for just those two structures to appear and reappear in PQA and stories. How easy to make music.
In this series of blog posts on rebar (there is one more) I have tried to focus on how PQA is nothing more than constant personalized questions using the structures. It is their frequent repetition that knits the whole process of using comprehensible input together.
The rebar should be strong and oft repeated before the story actually begins, and new structures should be few. We make soup, that’s all. We mash together the question words with the kids’ whimsical personalities and odd made up events that could never be true but make it all fun like a game, paying attention to their suggestions because those are key to all of it. Included into the mix are the target structures.
So, to put a point on it, we mix the target structures with the question words with the kids’ personalities and it all turns into PQA magic.
Sometimes in one personalized question all three target structures may even appear. That is time well used. We’re cooks who use SLOW cookers. We learn patience as we cook our way to the stars.