Many of us begin the year with the Circling with Balls activity. This activity builds high levels of trust and fun immediately and aids us in personalizing the room and norming the class in terms of classroom discipline and the rules (if you are not familiar with the Classroom Rules poster find it at www.benslavic.com/TPRS resources/posters).
As powerful as using this activity to start the year is, we should be aware that it can bring with it a certain amount of confusion to the minds of the students, just like the confusion and blank stares that can arise in regular PQA and in stories and in all comprehensible input activities.
To guard against confusion when we do PQA, for example, some of us ask three of our students to count how many times we say each structure during the PQA class. It is generally agreed that, if the PQA is to work, those counters should report back at the end of class that we got at least 70 repetitions on each of the structures during the PQA.
The PQA counters do so much. Not only do they tell us how many reps on the target structures we get, but, because we know during class that they are there counting how many times we are saying the target structures, they remind us, just by sitting there making tic marks on their paper, of the secret to the method – repetition.
The PQA counters also do things that we are not even aware of. They function as a kind of social glue. Because everyone knows that they are there counting, they bring us together in pursuit of a common goal. They spur us on to greater and greater amounts of reps – as if they are rooting for us and we are all on the same team. This has to be seen to be fully grasped as a powerful unifying force between the teacher and the students in the classroom.
In regular stories as well, we focus on the three structures and not on the story so that the kids can understand. We know that the kids’ brains cannot take in large amounts of new language at a time, being wired, rather, to simply absorb a few new sounds at a time. The kids are there, ready to use the signal that they don’t understand, and we are all working together toward our common goal of comprehensible input.
(At least we know that this is true in our classes, if it is not true with small children experiencing the language 24/7 as they grow up. This point of repeating certain structures over and over in class until we sense that they have been acquired marks a big difference between what children experience in learning their first language and in learning languages in comprehension based classes in schools.)
If we were to try to go shallow and wide with lots of structures but few repetitions of each structure in both PQA and stories, it just won’t work. Only going narrow and deep works, with lots of repetitions on few structures – it’s just how the mind acquires languages in our CI classes and is probably the most common error made by people new to the method – they say sentences that take the train off the tracks and pretty soon everyone is confused.
So, to repeat, the focus of the comprehensible input we do with our students should be focused on a few structures and not on the overall flow of the CI itself, which is being acquired on an unconscious level by the kids only because each sentence has one of the target structures in it functioning as rebar (search the word rebar on this site for more on this key concept).
It is as if, by focusing their minds on the structures (a conscious activity), we fool the kids into focusing on the meaning of the text (an unconscious activity), as per Krashen. As stated (it can’t be stated enough) teachers who learn about storytelling often fail to grasp this basic point about TPRS/CI, with disastrous results. We need rebar and we need lots of it for the concrete (the words) to make sense, to be held in place, just like in real buildings.
The above point is a dealbreaker in our success with comprehensible input. Now, if it is true that the mind of the teacher must be completely focused on repeating the structures in the PQA and stories so that the comprehensible input is narrow and deep and not shallow and wide, then it follows that anything we say in class has to have this repetitive quality of focusing on a single structure repeated lots of times, this rebar.
So also, to get to the point of this ramble (if it has one), in the Circling with Balls activity we must aggressively limit how wide the discussion goes. Just because we are using those cards and are not doing PQA or a story doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be aggressively trying to get all the reps we can on each thing we say.
The students cannot possibly stay with and absorb all the new structures that most teachers new to comprehension based instruction bring to the table during the Circling with Balls activity, and then they say that it and comprehensible input in general doesn’t work, even while their own instruction, for lack of rebar, is incomprehensible.
This point, of course, explains the wrestling match that most new teachers find themselves in with PQA when they first attempt to engage students in the friendly banter that makes PQA so unique, even if they get past the Circling with Balls part of the year successfully. Their inability to go narrow and deep explains their loss of effective CI in PQA and hence their fear of it.
But the answer to that loss of focus and consequent nervousness with CI is so simple! They just need to go shallow and wide and not narrow and deep when they talk to the kids in those all important few first days of school when everything for the year – everything – is decided. So if those teachers could just make their questioning in Circling with Balls narrow and deep and, of course, slower than painfully slow, it will all work!
If, when you are doing the Circling with Balls activity to start the year this fall, you are talking about how Landen plays basketball and Amber swims, then make “plays basketball” and “swims” your target structures in the PQA and belabor that discussion by going narrow and deep and slow with those structures only. Don’t add in that Landen plays basketball at midnight with four Chipmunks names Larry, Harry, Foot, and Finger in back of his house. All those new sounds are too much too soon for the kids to absorb.
Make “plays basketball” and “swims” your mantra for the entire class if that feels right (but it won’t because the physical existence of the basketball and the gesturing for swimming will lead to very fast acquisition, as opposed to regular PQA and stories, when we use more difficult combinations/chunks of words a lot more).
Again, never leave kids hanging by introducing new structures that may arise during the questioning. It is so easy to turn to the board and use Point and Pause if someone says something kind of cute, but you must immediately be aware that any new sound in a foreign language, unless it is really heavily gestured, is going to require lots of reps. That is why we now discourage the use of Point and Pause in this practice, even though a few years ago we thought we could use it with impunity.
Have compassion on your students in what you are asking them to do. Comprehensible input should only feel as if it is freewheeling and fun. Really, You are working your butt off staying on the structure that you want them to acquire, ever vigilant of the need to repeat the featured sound/target structure over and over until you feel the collective k’thunk of acquisition into the class as a whole.
In stories, when following a script, the river of our comprensible input has banks (the script) and the boat floats down the river successfully because we don’t say a single sentence in our story that doesn’t contain at least one of the target structures.
I feel that I must say these things over and over again so that teachers don’t screw themselves in the fall by going all over the place and going too fast and then wondering what the hell is going on in their classroom. Now, as we gear up for another year, is the time to think these things through and put these principles into our bodies so that we get our CI planes off the ground right away, on the first try, with no aborted takeoffs.
In Circling with Balls there are not three structures but rather unlimited structures to work with, which is different from PQA and stories. This is due to the personalized nature of the open questioning of 35 or more kids in the room. This makes the Circling with Balls activity all the more dangerous for us as we begin the year. We must absolutely get to know our kids in the first months of the year, but we must absolutely limit the amount of new sounds we present to the kids. There, I said it again.
Do whatever you have to do to make this sure kind of sure acquisition happen. If that means assigning kids to count how many times we say each of the kids’ activities (“plays basketball” and “swims”) just like we do in regular PQA, then do that. We must do whatever we have to do to make sure that our students never have to contend with more than a few new sounds at a time in class, even amidst all that input.
We must allow them the strength of good rebar so that they can relax and have the actual language go into their minds without their even knowing it, as Krashen says it happens and as per the original Design. We must learn to never leave insufficiently repeated structures for new ones when doing Circling with Balls until the kids have had enough reps on them so that they sound like English to them.
Of course, the above caution to stay with a structure until it is fully acquired as we begin the year applies not just to the Circling with Balls activity, but also to the other activities that many of us use to start the year, such as the Word Association activities and the One Word Image activities that are described, along with the Circling with Balls activity, on the TPRS Resources page of this site under Workshop Handouts (pages 3-11).