One colleague recently asked why we only have one word responses in circling. She couldn’t figure out why, when the kids obviously knew the answer, they didn’t output it right then in a complete sentence.
Here is one answer – it seems to me that when we are doing circling, and comprehensible input in general, we are plowing the field that leads to acquisition. We are plowing and planting, and the season, those first few years of CI, is springtime.
Now, how can flowers just grow from those seeds without the warmth and watering and time of the summer season? How can we have the kids experience input and output at virtually the same time? It would be like expecting a three year old to speak in crisp sentences right away.
CI, circling, all of that stuff that we do in the first few years of this kind of teaching, is input. Then, output is essentially an unconscious process requiring thousands of hours of input first, and it is just not natural to expect output too early.
This is especially true in school classrooms with peers surrounding kids who are at a hypersenstive age and have been told that they can be wrong in other classes. So I have to strenuously object to the output too early.
In my opinion, asking for output too early is like pulling a plant out of the ground in an effort to make it grow faster. Why not just let it grow at its own speed?