I had an insight about Point and Pause while reading Charlotte’s description of how to do the Wall Zoo. She wrote that she would use the kids’ personalized animals on the wall to ask questions like this:
..does the polar bear live in Alaska or in Afrika? Does the shark eat the penguin? Does the giraffe live with the fish? Do you like frogs…?
The insight is that, when doing CWB or this kind of work with a Wall Zoo, anything that is random PQA, the teacher usually chooses and circles only one verb like “lives in” or “eats” and just stays on it until it runs out of energy.
It’s classic beginnning PQA – the image of the animal is the entire focus of the kid, while getting lots of repetitions in a variety of settings on a verb is the entire focus of the teacher, in effect tricking the kid into focusing on the meaning and not the words.
We choose one verbal structure, circle it, and when it fades we choose another verbal structure – using Point and Pause to present it to the class – while the kid focuses on the language only unconsciously, which is the way comprehensible input works and why we suck if we use in English in class.
In this way, in one PQA class we may use Point and Pause ten times or more to introduce ten different verbs. The variables will be the subjects and objects, all personalized around the kids or their animals. Since verbs change during each PQA class, Point and Pause is thus necessary.
An example of this process is when we run out of interest on “lives in”, after getting 20 or 30 reps on it, we then park on another verb, like “eats” from Charlotte’s example above. When “eats” appears, we must use Point and Pause to introduce it. We have to because it is new. On it goes every time we change verbs during class – there always seems to be new information in PQA.
How does that differ from stories? Greatly. In stories we only use Point and Pause to point to our target structures, and ideally we don’t want to point to anything else. In stories we don’t introduce new structures. Three structures in one class is often too much. Two is about right.
Point and Pause, therefore, in stories, becomes something that clutters the board, causing confusion in the minds of the students and not clarifying things like it does in PQA. In stories, we stay with the same target structures the entire class, and we can’t add more, unlike the new things that always come up in PQA.
So, as a general rule, we can say that we use Point and Pause throughout a class of PQA, with CWB and WZ (Wall Zoo) especially, but in stories we avoid Point and Pause all we can, unless, of course, it is to point and pause at the target structures themselves during class.