I always like to have a mindset before beginning a week of comprehensible input – a game plan devoted exclusively to comprehensible input, if you will, that I will not deviate from. I want to spend the week on what matters, on what I know brings proven results. Otherwise, without the mental discipline of being focused on a few key skills when the students come in, because this stuff is so clumsy, and because there are so many distractions in teaching, I can forget what matters and waste instructional time.
I wonder how much instructional time in levels 1 and 2 (time not devoted entirely to some form of comprehensible input at those critical levels) that I have already squandered in my career. I don’t want to think about it. It’s not that I have to be perfect. Rather, my concern is about wasting the time on this planet of other human beings. That is not something I want to do.
In a discussion with Ray here a few weeks ago, Ray stated, after watching some videos, that staying in the target language is now number one in importance in his mind. I agree. In that discussion I had called that skill possibly the most important one in comprehensible input, not a false peak but the real mountain top of Krashen based instruction.
The number two most important skill to keep in mind before beginning a CI class, in my opinion, was the engaging of every kid in the room no matter what they had for breakfast, whom they’re mad at, or how horrible middle school was for them. However, I am going to bump that skill of engaging every student down to number four and insert as the second most important skill the skill of not going out of bounds. And I am moving SLOW up to number three, when it could easily be number one, of course.
Entire TPRS curricula have been written to this goal of not going out of bounds, so that no story is offered in which all the words haven’t appeared in the previous stories in the curricula. Talk about painstaking work! The most accurate one I have seen is Amy Catania’s Cuentos Fantasticos. I don’t know if it is still published, but that set of stories for younger kids is really crafted with precise introduction of vocabulary.
Anyway, we all will have our own skills that we are focusing on for any week, and here are mine – the six spokes that keep the fluency wheel rolling in my fluency based classroom – for December, in order:
1. staying in L2
2. staying in bounds
3. SLOW
4. engaging every kid in the room
5. Circling
6. Point and Pause
Those first three weren’t even in the top ten for a long time for me, so if you are still working on #4 through #6, don’t get all confused worrying about the first three. Keep it simple and work on one skill at a time so you don’t go nuts. Remember that this method is a very complex one that is at the same time very simple. In that sense the work required elevates what we do to a form of art, way beyond the mere delivery of instructional services. So it makes a lot of sense to say that, as with gaining virtuosity on the violin, in painting, in dance, or in any other artistic discipline, a lot of of time and practice aren required.