3.1.3. Keeping organized during stage II

It should be obvious that you need to spend a reasonable amount of time in preparing for your daily sessions with your LRP, and you may also want to put some thought and preparation into your informal social visiting as well. Your ideas for your next day's session will partly emerge as you go over what you did in today's session, and you can supplement this with ideas from your needs list. All of this planning would occur during your private language learning time, which might consume two hours altogether, during which time you will also engage in various other private activities, as I have discussed. Then you might spend two hours working with your LRP, and two hours in social visiting. You can spend additional time listening to comprehensible tapes while you are washing dishes, showering, cycling, skiing, or sleeping. And hopefully, you will be keeping your journal up to date, recording your daily experiences as a language learner and participant observer in the new culture. Make special notes of times of tension or conflict, and of times of communication difficulty or communication breakdown. You may also think of things to add to your needs list while writing in your journal.

The use of your tape recordings brings me back to your concern for massive comprehensible input. As you listen to tape recordings of your language session, it is good if you use a double cassette to dub important bits of the session onto another tape. Periodically, say once a month, you can dub samples of your own speech onto another tape in order to observe the improvement in your performance. Every day you will want to dub key portions of the speech of your LRP or other native speakers onto a more condensed tape. For example, every time your LRP uses the Series Method and tells you all the minute steps in some common activity, you will add this your condensed tape. In general, any stretches of speech by your LRP or other native speaker which contain new content, and which you can understand, should be added. If there are stretches that you cannot understand, you can dub these onto yet another tape, and later go over them with your LRP.

Going over difficult segments will provide the basis for a lot of extemporaneous conversational practice in subsequent sessions. With the help of your LRP, you will come to understand these difficult segments, and will then be able to add them to the collection of material that you can comprehend. The collection of taped material that you can comprehend is what I have elsewhere called a “comprehensible corpus” (Thomson 1992). The term corpus is used by linguists to describe their entire collection of speech samples for a language they have studied. Your comprehensible corpus is an ever growing collection of taped speech segments with which you become familiar by discussing them with your LRP as necessary, and by repeatedly listening to them. By the end of your full-time language learning period, you may have a comprehensible corpus of forty or fifty hours. Being familiar with such a large sample of speech will contribute to your general feel for the language. This general feel for the language will be the basis for continued progress in your ability to speak it yourself.