This from Nathaniel is gold, a must read. I made it into a Primer article. Of particular value is this sentence:
…VP’s goal is communicative. The language is used to find out and share information about each other in the class. The goal of the legacy teacher is to teach vocabulary to demonstrate knowledge on the quiz and test…. [ed. note: bold letters are mine. ]
Here is the article, now a Primer:
VP takes it a step further and talks about his family (he gives L2 input). He uses the tree to make it comprehensible and memorable. This is the what Krashen does when he does his monologue in German with body parts, pointing to his own eyes and mouth.
VP’s goal is communicative. The language is used to find out and share information about each other in the class. The goal of the legacy teacher is teach vocabulary to demonstrate knowledge on the quiz and test.
Blaine puts the pertinent family members into a story. The goal is for one or more family members to interact in such a way as to solve a problem which they have encountered.
If we follow from Ben’s circling with student interests, we can choose a student, start asking questions, put the information on the board as it comes from the student, circle it, get more details, circle it more, and give a Y/N quiz at the end of class. Then we can use the story writer’s notes, type them up and have a reading.
Then we move to another student, repeat the process, contrasting with the first students. The information that we can find out about depends on the verbs we want that are our focus (Verbs are our curriculum): has a brother, is X years old, his name is. etc. We can spin it off into a micro-story. The family tree develops visually as the description develops aurally and in our memories. This is how I did family members last year and will probably do so again this year.
Again, the legacy teacher is trying to teacher vocabulary for the vocabulary quiz and the project/HW/test. Blaine, Ben, and VP want to use the language as a vehicle for communicating and creating. VP wants students to find out about each other in L2. Circling with family trees is putting the students at the center of the class (we probably do not have time to find about everybody) and that is OK because we will personalize with them at some other way.
I agree, though, that VP needs to step it up a little with the CI, using circling so that the language expert in the room is providing a lot more CI.