One day I was watching my classes being taught by a teacher new to the method. I was coaching her from the side of the room.
Being new to it, she went extremely slowly. The kids responded beautifully, due to the excessive slowness. I felt the truth of SLOW at that moment.
One student, whom I perceived as something of a jerk because he didn’t pay enough attention in class was really hanging in there with this particular student teacher and her slower speech.
I had to recognize that his problem was not in fact his but mine. His failure to understand in my class was my problem. If comprehension-based teachers could just get that one idea, their relationships with their jobs would change.
To put it simply, when the kids are with you, you are going slowly enough. If your speech is too fast for even one student, it is too fast.
Since that eye-opening experience, I have learned through practice to speak in “chunks” of sound lasting three or four seconds. I have found that if I do not limit myself to that amount of time per utterance, I lose the kids. When I frame an image or an idea in these smaller “chunks” of sound, the kids understand me.
It is quite difficult to slow down in English, so why would we think it easy to do so when speaking to our students in the target language? SLOW requires strict self-discipline by us. The feeling should be of driving 10 miles an hour in a 45 mile an hour zone. If each word or comprehensible word chunk that we say is comparable to a house in a row of houses, there should be many yards between each house and not just a few inches.
Many of us work very hard at mastering all the other skills involved in learning comprehension-based instruction, but when we forget SLOW, we miss the entire point and invalidate all our efforts in learning the other skills. The other skills have no effect unless we go slowly!
If only one sentence could be repeated over and over and over in this PLC, it would be this one:
…we must speak to our students at all times in a way that makes us feel as if we are putting very large pauses, pauses that seem as if they are sometimes up to four or five seconds long, between each word or word chunk we say….