Circling is useless without SLOW, but SLOW can be quite effective without Circling. Point and Pause can be used to do the job that Circling does if the SLOW is slow enough.*
Even if we are masters of all of the various other skills used to deliver comprehensible input, we will fail to reach all our students unless we go so slowly that our instruction is comprehensible – that means at the pace of Linda Li.
We may reach the super fast processors when we go too fast. But this is a bad thing – it causes our classes to split into the faster processors and the others. This cannot work in schools. We create so much work for ourselves “remediating” kids when they need nothing more than a slower speaking teacher!
Why make extra work for ourselves when it is all so easily avoided by simply going at a pace that includes all the kids? It doesn’t matter if that pace is agonizingly slow for us – it is not agonizing for the kids. In fact, agonizingly slow for us may still be too fast for the kids!
It is counterintuitive, but you can get a surprising amount of a story done when you go really slowly. I was very surprised at NTRS when, in one session, we were able to create together a big package and a small package, one of which Lauren was afraid of, and so placed on the floor and went on a pogo stick to her mother’s house who refused to open it and then went on the Rio Grande somewhere else to get help with it but then it exploded.
The only reason it exploded was because we ran out of time in the session. And that was with teachers who didn’t know any French. That session really proved to me that people of different ability to process languages, if you go slowly enough to include them all, can cover a lot of ground. (Just because they are teachers and fluent in their own languages in no way means that all 50 of those teachers were fast processors – I personally learned in Linda’s workshop that I am a VERY slow processor when being a language learner.)
All people can easily learn languages and should not be penalized by us and made to feel stupid simply because they happen to be slow processors. If your class splits next year and you are going too fast and you get discipline problems, it will be because you went too fast and didn’t enforce the rules – see resources/posters of this site for the rules that work for me.
The main course of the CI meals that we daily serve our kids should always be SLOW.
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/09/17/thatll-stick-to-their-ribs/https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/07/23/slow/
*these are just my opinions based on my own experiences in the classroom