Non-targeted structures may or may not be acquired by the students – we don’t care. Our only focus is on the targeted structures and repeating them at least once in each statement or question we say no matter what. In the case of Circling with Balls, each activity drawn on a card by each student is the target structure. In the case of a scripted story, it’s the three structures targeted by the author of the script.
In the case of an L & D class devoted to discussion about a French painting, the instructor is advised to pick only one or two structures and hit them hard, thus going narrow and deep with those structures and avoiding the serious error of going shallow and wide, which takes the class right out of bounds.
The activity doesn’t matter, the repetition of the targets does.
There is another term we could use – “net structures”. These are the even smaller, less noticeable parts of a sentence that get into the flow of the language because they belong there and are essential for the students to learn correct grammar, which is properly spoken language and not a two dimensional filing exercise as was thought in the past.
Net structures can’t be presented in a conscious, visual way like targeted structures, but they still occur and the kids still hear them and, eventually via repetition on a completely unconscious level, the kids acquire them.
This is the way Krashen says it all works, unconsciously. And in my view this is the way it works and let’s get over thinking that the conscious mind has a place in acquiring a language. For more on the Net, and that we learn languages in our Unconscious faculty, search those bolded categories here.
Here is an example taken from Circling with Balls. We learn from looking at the cards that:
Randy plays soccer and Jane reads.
Now those cards can be circled in a variety of ways like this:
Class, Randy plays soccer. (ohh!) Does Randy play soccer? (yes) Class, does Randy or the teacher play soccer? (Randy) Correct, class, Randy plays soccer. (ahh!) Does the teacher play soccer? (no) Yes, class, the teacher plays soccer! (ohh!) That’s right class, Randy plays soccer and the teacher plays soccer, but there is a problem! Randy plays better than the teacher! (ohh!)
Now, that last sentence has the one targeted structure (plays soccer), and then it has those other words: better than, teacher, there is, problem. the, a.
So, when we present comprehensible input, we must learn to focus when we speak on the big fish constantly (plays soccer), ignoring the very small fish, leaving that part of aquisition to the students’ deeper minds which are always unconsciously trapping and processing everything (later in sleep) in a nearly mystical process that we need to just stay out of.
We have to trust the net to catch the fish it was meant to catch, as it were. It is a very tight net so few words get by, but the fisherman (the Language Acquisition Device) has the final say in what fish are kept and what fish are thrown back into the ocean.
Since we just don’t know how all that works, we have to leave it alone. That is why I don’t plan what I teach. What do I know about when the mind acquires what? Krashen’s Natural Order of Acquisition speaks to this.
Again: those small net structures stick in the mind by a process that we can know nothing about. When we try to get involved with that process, we do so at great expense to our students’ confidence. There we are, rushing to explain everything in English and, even worse, testing them on net words, which is brutal.
How about everybody give up the testing on individual words? When you say that you are merely trying to assess whether they have learned the words, you sound like a teacher. Let all that go, just speak to them in L2 and get over your teacher self. Language teachers, if you haven’t noticed, have a pretty bad track record of teaching language.
I don’t think of our crowd as teachers so much as renegades who differ from teachers in the sense that our students show real gains and sign up for our classes the next year, and we don’t really teach, we just speak the language to them and have them read a lot. That brings the gains, not anything connected to the archaic concept in language education that we can actually teach someone a language. That’s now how it works.
When we don’t trust the net we plan and we speak lots of English, explaining everything in a way that is bewildering to our students, and we explain from fear that they won’t learn and in the very explaining our students can’t learn. It’s a paradox.
Our students have a much higher chance of acquire much of what we say as long as we could just let the unconscious mind alone process everything it heard or read that day, all by itself, without all our meddling, that night in deep sleep, down there in the magical language factory of the unconscious mind.