A modified (to reflect the current topic of milking) repost from 2009:
In one Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger repeats only the words “I’m all right” for the entire song. That’s the message. (Apparently even Mick needs reps on that one, right? I certainly do!) Anyway, that ultra simplistic patterning of meaning made me think that maybe we sometimes try to introduce too much language into our instruction too soon.
Both George Friederich Handel and The Ventures reveal a tendency toward simple repetition of only one or two key musical ideas in their music as well. Because of all the repetition of ideas, I am able to digest the full musical notion that is being offered by the composer. As a language teacher, I like that. I like the repetition. Repetition helps my students remember and allows me to see much greater engagement than when I try to teach too many phrases, too much language.
[Note to Dana: that paragraph above expresses one of the prime reasons I have tried to shorten the length of story creation to 25 min. in my new Invisibles approach, invented right there at AES in the classroom next to yours!]
The Messiah takes a few ideas and repeats them without getting any deeper into it then repetition of the same line. Simple ideas repeated over and over. Walk, Don’t Run by the Ventures does the same thing. Of course, these are not the only two musicians who do this – most great music is simple and repetitive. BB King sings that “The Thrill Is Gone” – that’s all he basically says in the song. It doesn’t make the song less interesting.
I am wanting to model that in my teaching. I want relaxed discussion and extended scenes that have maybe three or four sentences, but that take about a half an hour to do. Like the Messiah and Walk, Don’t Run and The Thrill is Gone. Of course, the musical support in Handel is there to increase interest by bathing the words in orchestral richness, but we can’t have everything.
What is the secret to avoiding boredom in the CI classroom? How can we generate interest without an orchestra?
Well, in music, as soon as it gets a bit repetitive, those composers do specific things to bring more interest. One thing they do do is to change keys, which re-colors the entire shade of the composition (the Ventures, especially, do this) without adding in a new idea. We can do this when we speak the idea differently, for example, whispering it, or yelling it, or saying it romantically. It’s an easy thing to forget, but it is there, nevertheless, and we can do it anytime in a story if we can just remember to do it. Dialogue is a secret for that as well, and the Director’s Cues.
Another way to bring interest is to use silence. Both Handel and The Ventures often place little pauses between ideas, and it is in these pauses that the magic happens. Language sinks into the deeper mind during those little pauses. If it can happen in the music, then it can happen in our our classrooms. Then, with frequent crossing of the hemispheres via brain breaks, the new information gets stored in the hard drive and real acquisition occurs.
The point being explored here is simply that comprehensible input is perhaps best when it is limited to a single or a very few ideas – the repetition of a few simple ideas throughout a song or a simple little scene is perhaps the most effective in building fluency. The brain simply needs the repetition, it needs happy neurons, not exhausted neurons trying to keep up with a runaway story.
Maybe one of the reasons stories are so hard for so many of us is that we try to introduce too much language. Not maybe, certainly. When we try to teach certain language from lists, we lose. We think that learning weather expressions can be done in a few days if injected enough into stories, but , in reality, the SOUNDS of those expressions, which are what the mind must master to truly know them (vs. for a written test), are deeply complex, and to expect a student to acquire ten weather expressions in the course of a week is beyond absurd.
Memorize it for a test and remember it for twenty four hours, yes, but acquire it, no. I am glad that we are at least finally figuring that out in language teaching. I am glad that we are finally learning how the mind works, and how much it needs things to be repeated.
Related: (2nd half of this clip)