I keep the PQA going on three structures for an entire class on Monday to set up the story on Tuesday. I need to do that. The success of the story rests on as many reps of each target structure as I can possibly get. I like to get over 100 on each before starting a story.
How do we count? We use baseball pitch counters. It is a sought after job for kids to be a counter of PQA structures, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/jobs/
A lot depends on the power in the structure. Some structures are boring – they don’t lend themselves to lively discussion at all. I let them go. I establish meaning, ask for a gesture, use it a few times, feel how flat it is, and go on.
We don’t need here in Step 1 of TPRS to get bogged down trying to PQA structures that don’t lend themselves to fun. Skip ’em. They’ll acquire them in the story or in ten stories or a hundred stories as they occur naturally as per Krashen’s Natural Order of Acquisition hypothesis.
Lots of people in the TPRS/TCI world like to fret about targeting and presenting lots of reps on certain high frequency words but I don’t care. I figure if it is a high frequency word, it will occur, well, highly frequently and the kids will learn them that way, because they are so commonly occurring. (Am I missing something on that point? Should I be planning structures?)
The unconscious focus by the student on meaning of groups of words over very long periods of time is what drives real acquisition. The brain organizes what it hears in ways that we could never understand. While we sleep. Yeah, while we sleep.
The brain hears it in class, then later, it has an “acquisition party” in which it does things while we sleep that we could never do when awake in terms of building a language system (that’s why it’s done when we sleep, when we can’t mess it up!).
If the language it heard that day was good and transparent and fun, with lots and lots of reps, it goes into the “acquired” section of the brain during sleep. If the teacher spent the class period that day, however, talking about the test on Friday in English, nothing much happens in the way of acquisition that night in sleep.
We could never organize our language instruction in a conscious way as per this recent statement here by Michael:
…the language is so complex with so many little pieces, that I could never get to it all if I taught it one piece at a time – and as soon as I got to the next piece, they would have forgotten the one I just taught. One great thing about comprehensible input is that every time you teach, you are incorporating some of that complexity, and after a little while it doesn’t seem so complex any more….
So all we have to do is deliver the CI. We are “deliverers of CI” and not “deliverers of instructional services” (Ted Sizer’s term, one of the Common Principles of his Coalition of Essential Schools).
If what Krashen says is true that people learn languages by focusing on meaning and not on the words themselves, then when we do PQA for the entire class period on Mondays, we need not worry if a structure lacks power or interest, we only need to focus on the structures with power and power up and PQA them intensely.
When the structure’s inherent power is at work in the classroom, everybody knows it. We never say a sentence in the entire class, as the kids are counting structures, that does not have one of the targeted structures in it.
The reps go by. Sleep happens hours later. In go the most oft repeated structures from our class into the acquisition files of our students. The others? The ones we didn’t get that many reps on or were delivered in a boring way? Not that night, but another, when they also have been heard enough in meaninful context.
On this topic, also read the recent two posts about telling and not asking kids. It is another way, the best way, to stretch out PQA for long periods of time.