We all know that the key idea in CI is to present only new words in the forms of the structures – that every single word in a story, in an ideal world, has already been acquired and so the comprehensible input generated in class can be 100% focused on the real lesson – the three structures. Of course, this is rarely possible, especially in view of recent discussion here on this topic.
Our standard response to the need to introduce a new word into a story – a rogue word, as it were – has always been to use Point and Pause. This clarifies new words that arrive into the story. Doing so can be dicey, however, because if we introduce too many new words into the story we can lose the class totally. Many teachers new to the method have made this mistake.
Let’s make this clear by repeating the point: Point and Pause should not be used in stories except more than a few times. If your board is littered with new words after a PQA session or a story, you can take that as an indicator that your students learned very little that class period.
They may have followed the story line, but they didn’t retain much because the new words were not acquired. Not enough rain for the plants. Your goal in a story is to always teach the three structures, creating a downpour of the three structures into the input. That is why story scripts that work have three locations with the three structures repeated mechanically in each location of the script. The script keeps you honest. It keeps you from plowing the train into the sand off the tracks.
The more we limit Point and Pause, the fewer times we introduce new words, the better. So, it seems logical that if a teacher finds herself going out of bounds in the story all the time (this is usually indicated by an internal wave of panic), a good self discipline tool would be to simply hide all the markers in the room and just use the laser pointer to bring in words from the word wall and other words already known to the class and stick to the story like white on rice and who cares how boring it is.
For more on this, read Sample Stories A through D in TPRS in a Year!