Power of Circling
Alisa Shapiro has said:
“Circling incorporates all the other language embedded in the question, and helps gets those pieces/chunks acquired, too. This is particularly critical for novice/beginners. The circled questions include all kinds of morphology and syntax, plus students get tons of modeling of the phonetic system. The implicit instruction that gets in the way of prepositions/clause language, object pronouns, reflexive pronouns, etc. also gets laid in via circling.”
Alisa continues:
“I’ve noticed that I can get away with much less circling for my oldest/most experienced TCI group. I assume that’s because they’ve already acquired the ancillary language, and we’ve (hopefully) also accelerated their processors – so they can listen more effectively. Then we have tons of other ways to get the repetitions in, other than circling, and we can mix it up with PQA etc. sooner.”
In one middle school CI class, I saw first year 6th graders in February require absolutely no circling. Most understood almost all of what their teacher said, which was proven by their tremendous amounts of unforced output.
However, that lack of need for circling in February was directly connected to a ton of directed, more mechanical, circling back in the fall. In that particular class as well, the students had done truly excessive amounts of TPR and verb slam work (both described later in this text) in the fall. Since the greatest need for circling is on verbs, and since the teacher had taught verbs so heavily five months before, there was a lot less need for circling in the middle part of the year.
Over time, circling becomes intuitive and you will find that you won’t even have to remember to even think about circling once that happens. You will find yourself just asking the next logical question simply because you want to know the answer to it.