A second metaphor, a heavier one, that illustrates the importance of verbs in our work can be found in the image of dump trucks. Each truck is a verb that is loaded up with all the other parts of speech that make up the anguage.
The truck goes to the job site, gets loaded up with big boulders, up to nine or ten of them or even more, or as few as one really big boulder – the subject of the sentence. It takes the boulders where they are going and dumps them.
Buried in the rubble, the dumping ground of used speech, the boulders are usually not seen again in that particular combination. They have been dumped. But the truck, a bit more beat up now but no less willing to return to the job site and transport more rocks, returns to the work site for more rocks.
(In the cases of some users of speech, the loads are heavy and consist of big pieces of ugly concrete or roughly hewn boulders, but in the case of the poets, the loads are light, and some contain big diamonds. Such is the nature of language, which can be ugly or sublime depending on who is using it.
(What is communication? We need not go into that here, but one thing we need to say about it in the context of this discussion is that it is the core standard of ACTFL and will describe the goal of everything we do in our classrooms, including assessment, so we better pay attention to it if we are in a Standards Basd Grading school, and who is not these days?)
The Communication Standard will determine all of the curricular decisions made by language teachers in the 21st century, so we better pay attention to those big dump trucks, the verbs, as they drive communication all over town, and without which we would have no communication at all.
How to ensure a safe delivery of the rocks? Use comprehensible input. With CI, the sentence is understood and the boulders safely delivered in the rich bed of the trucks via comprehensible input. If there is no truck, there is no delivery of language.
As long as the motors of the verb delivery trucks owned by Din & Co. are purring and running well in your classroom, then the resulting comprehensible input will pave the way for a great year! Just don’t shortchange your students by not providing them with huge amounts of trips between the job site of human communication and the dumping grounds.