Kuma 3 and Brown 4 and 16

Brown's chapter 4 was about various language learning principles and how to teach toward/for these principles.  To organize these principles he used sub categories, cognitive, affective, and linguistic principles. Automaticity is one of the cognitive principles which claims that "both adults and children must sooner or later move away from processing language unit by unit, piece by piece, focusing closely on each, and 'graduate' to a form of high-seed, automatic processing in which language forms are only on the periphery of attention." For me as a language learner I would like to know at which point in language does this actually occur?  Is this an ongoing struggle for even beginning level learners or is this principle to be used only for reaching level learners?  The book mentions that focus on form is not harmful but especially helpful when there are adult language learners, which makes me think that teaching through a variety of principles may be a good alternative to method.  The section on automaticity also mentions the quality of a teacher you need to be when teaching automaticity which is patience (one of the things I had in the beginning of the year on my list of qualities of teachers of ELLs). 
Chapter 16 concentrates on teaching listening.  In this chapter it mentions the silent period that language learners go through, which is nothing new to me, however, I would really like to know how to tell when a student is in a silent period (so that I am not grading them on low participation) and how to encourage them to speak?  The interactive model of listening gives processes that I have noticed in my beginning level learners at the ELI go through.  Finding out their background knowledge is always important so that they can decode a question based on the background vocabulary they have.  Many times, I will ask a question and get an answer that is unanticipated.  Like if I asked "Who is in your family?" and they respond "My family is in Nigeria." I can tell that they knew it was a "wh" question and about family and decoding the wh question went wrong.  Speaking of asking questions, I liked how Kuma broke down different types of questions to ask language learners.  the question that I mentioned above was I think a display question, because it had predetermined answers.  Kuma states that "learners' responses to referential questions [not display] were propositionally longer and grammatically more complex than their responses to display questions."  But if my students are not able to produce correct answers to these types of questions that are provided in real life contexts shouldn't they be valued just as much as the display questions?