There was a girl who was failing all her classes. Her demeanor was just plain mean. But she was thriving in my CI classroom. She was actually the class superstar. She told me, when I asked once if I was going slowly enough, “Mr. Slavic, do you know how you can ride a bike so slowly that you end up falling over? That is how slow you are going”.
This was not true, however. The input felt slow to this girl because she was a very fast processor. She was failing most of her other classes, but she was a fast processor. What about the slow processors? Going slowly and teaching to the eyes guarantees that the slow processor as well as the fast processor stay in the web of connectedness of what is going on in the classroom.
Is that slow pace going to hurt the fast processors in anyway? No. Just no. They don’t know the language and they are getting deep neurological programming and if they complain about the speed tell them not to, to just listen and be happy that they are so gifted. Ask for their good will.
When kids experience the language sufficiently slowly, their affective filters go way down, and all of the students in the class, not just the fast processors, gain the confidence necessary to acquire the language and move on to the higher levels. There lies your team building. Then your enrollment goes up and you have more job security and, because you are using comprehensible input, you don’t hate your job anymore.
That is not a stretch, in fact. By going so slowly in your classroom, you guarantee your own job security and your students’ motivation and confidence. Those are good reasons to take this SLOW thing seriously!