Ben:
Teach what’s up. If one sentence is up but hasn’t been acquired, don’t leave it. Why would you leave it? It hasn’t been acquired yet!
If a sentence has some new grammar concept like the sound of the future tense vs. tenses they are used to, stay with it. Just hone that sentence. Craft it. Repeat it more than you feel like you need to, and do so at a slower pace. They don’t know the language!
Teach for acquisition and stop trying to “cover” a certain amount of targeted material – a story script, a reading, the right amount of PSA, whatever. You haven’t made it to the third location in a story for years. OK, maybe once or twice. But who’s counting?
Teach for acquisition, which means go narrow and deep with less material, even if that means only one or two sentences over the course of the entire class period. I give you permission to stay on one sentence a lot longer than feels right to your ears.
Just quit skating on the surface. No longer in WL education is there the need to “teach the lesson”, or “cover the material”. How silly! There is no lesson! Then what is there? There is only the need to provide the students with language that is transparent to them!
All that is needed is to provide mega personalized repeated sentences and questions that are easy and fun that lead to huge amounts of comprehensible input. Comprehensible input – that’s the lesson plan right there, dude! The old days are, well….old. They’re done. Stick a fork in them.