Tina wrote this on the CI Liftoff FB page, which is devoted to discussion about non-targeted input:
I gave a short talk on Story Listening and gave a demo with the Québecois tale “Ti Malice et Monplaisir” in sunny, beautiful Ellensburg, Washington, yesterday at WAFLT. The topic of circling target words/structures (which I would call “going deep and narrow” with the input) versus providing richer language (which could be called “going wider”) came up because I explained that I used to be a Circling Maven. I have the baseball clickers to prove it too.
After the talk, several teachers talked to me about their experiences with circling target structures. They mentioned how much work it is. How it loses its luster with the kids. How they struggled with the kids who didn’t “get it” after ALL THOSE REPS. And how all those reps were hard to get…they took a lot of work.
I had a thought. Why do we want to make it our goal to say the same thing 70 times when we could make it our goal to use those 70 times to say 50 different things? (I say 50 because even though I am not circling, I still “recycle” which would be going back to the beginning of the story/image/whatever and kind of reviewing the previously-discussed facts, and I still ask questions from time to time, just not massive reps of questions like in circling.)
Since each kid is at a different place regarding their acquisition, they each need different input to “click” into their unique, developing interlanguage system. So why not make the input as wide and rich as possible while not losing kids? Some ways to work on making sure we do not lose them are:
Make sure they are not totally lost, like not following the plot of the story. And make the input compelling. Stephen Krashen recently posted on the More TPRS list that he would hypothesize that with more compelling input the students can tolerate more ambiguity in the language. I am inclined to agree. To me, the interestingness of my classes has been considerably increased this year, with having learnt of Story Listening from Beniko and with using Ben‘s One Word Image process and his method of telling stories using Invisibles. Alternating between these two approaches has made this year, my eleventh, the best yet.
Anyways, revenant aux moutons, I realized, talking to these teachers, that letting our language flow more naturally, and not trying so hard for massive reps of the targets of the day, is like throwing a few sandbags off our hot-air balloons. It has been for me, anyway.