A rebar (short for reinforcing bar) is a steel bar used in reinforced concrete structures to hold the concrete together. In that way, three rebar rods in a piece of concrete would be like the three structures we use to hold stories together.
Now, we could use cheap rebar – insufficiently repeated structures before moving into the story – or we could use carbon based or even cast iron rebar – heavily repeated, highly personalized structures presented for a long time before the story is begun.
I know that if I repeat each structure like 85 times times on Monday (I ask the kids to count them in our PQA sessions to get ready for the story on T/W), then the story will be, as it were, made of tempered, fired, very strong steel.
I have seen this over and over since I started with this. Not only are the stories stronger when we get the high quality carbon rebar, but also I have definitely noticed that kids absent on Monday are pretty much out of it on Tuesday.
The fewer the new words (they are like the rocks in the concrete that the rebar/structures are reinforcing), the more the focus of the PQA is on the structures, the greater will our students eventually be able to focus on the meaning of the story (the overall concrete) rather than being forced to worry about a bunch of new sounds, the individual words/rocks that make up the concrete.
This is in keeping with what Krashen says to do – make the process of learning a language a largely effortless, largely unconscious process. About all that is required is that the language be presented in a way that the learner feel the opposite of anxious and that the content be interesting to her, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/07/18/we-learn-languages-unconsciously-1/
All the output will come later. It is absolutely true that we learn languages by absorbing them unconsciously first – without analysis. We must continue in our CI instruction to put our students’ focus on the forest and not on the individual trees. We focus on the building and not on the rocks that make it up, and we need the rebar to be strong so that the building/story is strong.
Comprehensible input is a natural process. The conscious decoding of individual words is not necessary – in fact it works against everything. Their meaning becomes clear within a context of chunks of sound, not individual words. The beauty is in the larger thing, the forest, the building, the story, its meaning.
The target structures, the rebar rods, play their role. They allow the power of the deeper mind to decode the message. In one class period the mind could not decode fifty target structures, rebar rods, any more than the concrete could hold fifty rebar rods – they would overload the structure in the same way too many target structures would overload the power of the mind to decode all that sound into meaning.