In the Pringle Man video from New Delhi, which was done about a year ago at the beginning of my exploration of the concept of creating stories with invisible characters, at one point I include the term “trimmed” when talking about Pringle Man’s mustache and hair in the drawing provided by my students. I could have easily added the word into the story itself, but chose to include it in the reading.
It doesn’t matter. When we include a non-targeted word in a story, when a word “emerges” into a story, it does so because it is interesting to us in the flow or our natural conversation. We don’t include it because it is connected to a curriculum or thematic word list somewhere. What is going on is a process of “natural emergence” in which we actually want to use the new words in our story. In this model, the comprehensible input in the Pringle Man story, particularly in the passage from 5:55 to about 9:00, exhibits no artificially forced repetitions of words that the students probably don’t care about, and no expectation of mastery.
Including the word “trimmed” in the reading, or wherever in the CI process, was a good (read “natural”) inclusion of the word there. It wasn’t forced. It just emerged naturally. This fits in with Krashen’s view that input must not be forced and emerge naturally. In fact, the input is “pure”, not targeted at all. It is neither T1 nor T2. The word “trimmed” emerged when I wrote the reading and so is “emergent” and not “targeted”.
Tina was talking with Mike Peto yesterday and she told me that Mike uses the term “pure” instead of “non-targted”. It does describe the kind of comprehensible input that we see in the Pringle Man video and the kind of CI that I feel will now replace targeted input altogether. Mike is stating the obvious, that non-targeted CI is actually nothing more than pure comprehensible input. This is what Beniko Mason says as well, as I understand it. When Mike Peto and Beniko Mason say it, I believe it. Perhaps the word “non-targeted” will eventually be replaced by the term “pure”.
Here is the link to the Pringle Man video:
Consider some of the words that we are talking about in this discussion:
1. neither T1 nor T2
2. not forced
3. emergent
4. natural
5. authentic
6. pure
7. communication based on a shared wish to actually find something out from each other
8. active negotiation of meaning
9. no expectation of mastery
10. no artificially forced repetitions of words