Summary: Practitioners of CI get a lot more bang for their buck when they spread the process of getting repetitions on the language out over a process of reading the story, as opposed to using circling to get reps during the creation of the story.
You may want to read this if you still use circling as a TPRS/CI tool. Why? It is because if you are still circling you may be making a mistake. The kids don’t like it.
Circling was invented by someone in Blaine Ray’s circle (not exactly sure who it was, maybe Blaine himself) around 2004. I was in the front row of a training here in Denver when he unveiled it.
I thought it was very cool at the time and used it a lot for about five years, but then the shine started to fade as I realized how boring it was to my students. Blaine touted it as the new “thing” in TPRS. He should have left it alone.
Circling seemed to make sense at the time. People who were using TPRS had always been flailing around trying to get the kids to understand from about 1993 to 2004. So when circling showed up everyone went after it like flies on honey.
The problem is that it conflicted with the research.
The research – 30 years of it – showed that the most important element in making CI work was interest, not repetition. That is why Krashen called his method the Natural method, and not the Repetition method.
The idea of getting reps (via circling) etc. has been grossly mismanaged by the experts, who thought that they had to take a structure or something that comes up in a story and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it in various ways before going on to something new. This intense repetition of a word or structure in real time during a story had deleterious effects, because it was boring.
Here are the points I would like to make on this topic:
1. After the first rep of the structure, if the kids understood it, a gradual decline in interest happened, just as it would in any L1 conversation. The kids don’t care about reps, they want to know what happens. To test this idea, start using circling to speak to someone near you right now.
2. So circling made me think that my job in my CI classroom was to teach “ran” to the class as a structure, because it was in some list that my students would be tested on. The actual FACT was that I merely needed to communicate with my students to fulfill the standard.
3. So if the story was about a girl running to the post office, the class would hear “Class, the girl ran to the post office!” Then they would all say “Oh!” like they were interested (even thought half of them didn’t understand and only said “Oh!” because I told them to, not because they understood.
4. Then I would say “Class, did the girl run to the post office?” (Yes!) and a few bright kids in the class would start to think “I know that since you just said it!” And the borefest would begin.
5. Then I would say, “Class, did the girl run to the post office or the school?” I’m thinking, “Look how clever I am getting all these repetitions on what I want them to learn!” but the kids are thinking “This is getting boring. My teacher keeps saying the same thing over and over!”
6. Then eventually the heads would start dropping on the desk and the hoodies would start to go up and the phones would come out, not because the kids are shitty kids but because they were being bored. All they wanted was to know what was going to happen!
7. So just stay on the story line and do not circle. Keep in mind that your desire to get lots of reps on a structure is not consistent with the research and thus should be avoided. It’s a teacher thing and if, over the past 15 years here sharing thoughts about language teaching with each other, we haven’t learned that the very concept of “teaching a language” is not consistent with the research (we can only provide comprehensible input), then we need to have our heads examined.
8. Does this mean that the reps won’t happen in the non-targeted form of comprehensible input that I push on this site? Of course not. But – instead of short rapid reps happening all in a group during the story – they happen in vast amounts during the Phase 4 reading options. That’s the big point of this article – that yes we can get massive amounts of reps around the star but NOT via the sadness and predictability of circling.
9. To repeat – the big difference between circling and the way I get reps on the star is that the reps when circling is used occur in a short period of time (about 30 seconds) during the story whereas when the Star Sequence is used they (the reps) all occur during the reading phase but are spread out over 14 different activities (my reading options), and I have designed the star with the “big deal” part of it being the Reading phase. That is the way CI works – the kids hear it and understand the message and then they read it and bam! – they acquire. (Note: the last sentence is the most important thing I’ve ever learned about CI in 20 intense years of thinking about it 24/7.)
10. The kids in the class only want to know what happened at the post office! So a big-ass conflict happens in any class where circling is used. The teacher wants one thing (to repeat the structure) and the class wants another thing (to know what happened).
11. Circling has therefore derailed the very intent and purpose of TPRS over the past fifteen years, gutting its effectiveness. The research says nothing about getting reps and everything about sharing what happened to keep the kids’ interest high.
12. The point of this article, therefore, is that any TL expression being “taught” in order to prepare the kids for some totally unnecessary test does not reflect how languages are actually acquired, but only how they are learned. (Krashen’s Acquisition vs. Learning hypothesis.) Acquisition cannot happen except in normal speech and does not happen in the circling way. To repeat, the research says that acquisition is a function of natural and normal speech. See the article on the Art of Conversation below.
13. Indeed, circling was a really big error and Blaine shouldn’t have presented it to the TPRS community at all in 2004. It not only represented a big diversion from the research, it (along with its twin mistake of using CI to teach/target structures from a list) may have ruined TPRS, because it’s ineffective as shit right now.
14. Blaine himself, of course, is not to be faulted for this error. It was the people around him, who couldn’t see how natural and consistent everything Blaine did from 1993 to about 2004-2005 was (they couldn’t really understand it and I have talked to both Krashen and Blaine about this) and since they didn’t have that vision to see how accurately he was interpreting the research for that early ten year period, they started the big twisting of the research, in order to help teachers who couldn’t see the big picture and now in 2019 TPRS is a mere shadow of what Blaine invented.
15. So again – the thing about getting more reps is that we should do it by using different reading activities that are more natural for the kids. Thus, Phase 4 in the Star Sequence is what gets the job done on getting lots of reps. Just exercise some patience and get it done over a longer period of time during class as per the Star Sequence – it’s just better and not at all boring to the kids.
Here is the Star Sequence for those who haven’t seen it:
Article on the Art of Conversation:
Here is a very important related article to the topic discussed in this post: