Bryce ends his four part series on reading with this:
Reading more than once is OK. Hearing it more than once is OK.
Once is not enough. Reading a text over and over is good. We have to figure out how to get kids to do that.
I think that there are other reasons to read more than once that are less pedagogical but that are still valid, because I am also a stakeholder in the class: I get tired; I get overwhelmed by paperwork and deadlines; sometimes I even get lazy.
The other day for P.A.T. time I was exhausted and I had to garner my voice for parent teacher conferences, so I gave the students some options that would be easy on me. They had the choice of playing games in pairs or watching a video of Pobre Ana that they had previously seen. The students know it is OK to repeat, but we had already seen it a second time at the end of the first semester a few months ago. Surprisingly, the vote went to the video. Not one student said that it was stupid or asked why we had to watch this again. I anticipated some sighs, or grumbling, but instead, to my great surprise they said things like, “This is easy!” or, “I can understand this so much better now!” They were mostly engaged and most seemed to enjoy seeing and hearing it again, this time with greater understanding. C.I. nirvana.
My adult students have spontaneously been doing this for years. Some have put the CD’s of books in their cars’ CD players and have left it there for weeks. Every time they get in, they listen, and boy do they start getting fluent.