This is a repost of an article from a few years ago. I publish it here because of Angie’s recent question about emergence of writing:
I got this question:
Q. My kids can’t speak or write. The speaking is the problem. Any thoughts?
A. They can’t speak or write. Those are output skills and they are not ready to do them any more than one can actually see the future building when the foundation is still being put in or like you can’t see a flower when it is still a seed.
You are not the one to decide when speaking and writing happen in your students. It could happen in a year for certain fast processing kids, and in five years or more for slower processors.
This is Krashen 101. We let our emotions get in the way because we pour tons and tons of comprehensible input at them in the form of stories and readings and we want them to then speak and write because of all of our input efforts. It doesn’t happen that way.
It is such a complex process that we don’t get to be in on it. It is that way with the really special and delicate things in nature. The most important processes in life are carefully hidden from meddling human hands.
The creation of a baby, the creation of a flower, the creation of language and things like that are all hidden from man for a reason, and that reason is that man can mess it up too easily if he has access to the process.
We have plenty of proof of that point provided for us by the tens of thousands of teachers of languages who don’t understand enough to leave the process alone and who prove every year, at the great expense of millions of students worldwide, what real pedagogical ignorance is, as they try to make a flower appear from a seed that is not ready.
Do the math. Even in a fourth year class, if it takes 10,000 hours of input to produce understandable speech, and your kids so far have realistically 600 hours (180 days X 50 minutes is 150 hours maximum per year), then how is that going to lead to speech?
(Honestly I don’t care how many hours it takes and it doesn’t matter how many it actually takes. That is what I find so stupid about research. Who cares whether it is 10,000 or 18,000 hours? It takes a long time.)
There is a huge amount of time, many years, to get to output of speech. So much water and good soil and sunlight (all forms of input) is needed to push the plant all the way up out of the ground and grow into a big beautiful flower. You are maybe 5% of the way to where they will start the spontaneous speech and that is if they are upper level students.
This has got to frustrate Krashen. To do all that research and then have intelligent people not get how long it really takes to acquire a language to the point of real emergence of speech just because of the way schools are set up.
Isn’t that truly odd? Schools are set up to give the impression that, since kids are in upper levels that something must be happening on the level of speech when really they are like infants, or very young children, who need years and years to be get to emergence.
And don’t forget what Krashen said last week and which really validated something that I have felt very strongly about my entire career that I never got any validation on before – that the first year of language instruction should be all auditory. What, are we going to just ignore that comment?
They will speak when they speak. And we absolutely must not allow anyone to give us any heat about that. No parents, no administrators, and certainly no kids who have no idea what this is all about should be allowed to question are expertise in this matter of speech and writing output.
If you want them to speak, then speak to them more and more. Water the seed.