The teacher who pays full attention to the absolute importance of sufficiently repeating the structures [rebar] and limiting the amount of new words [concrete rocks] to create tight, personalized CI with strong rebar but not too many rods will definitely experience success with comprehensible input.
We hit the spirals, park, and know when to leave each parking level and move down to the next, circling enough high interest PQA in so that the repetitions take hold in the deeper mind of the listener, bringing greater and greater interest until so many details have been added in to that idea that we are forced to add in a new character or event to launch the story forward.
That is what I have come to understand is the PQA process – we circle the three structures with the question words, weaving together the structures and the questions. We talk about our students in outlandish ways, never breaching their trust, always cultivating humor at the expense of no one.
We never allow the circling train to get off the track and onto the sand. We mash together the personalized questions with the structures, following, sometimes in wonder, the spontaneous unfolding energy of the thing. The structures hold it all together, no matter where it goes.
If that is true, then we must use Point and Pause (presenting new words, more rocks) in a much more limited way than before. Each time we present and translate a new word, it puts stress on both the rebar and on the concrete by adding, as it were, another rock to the concrete. The kids’ minds can only bear so much weight, even with really high quality rebar. (That also is why story scripts must be simple.)