Back in 2008 Robert found a wonderful line from poet Hart Crane and shared it with us here. It deeply supports Krashen in the most beautiful way:
“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”
Robert went on:
I experienced that several times this summer. My first week away I was at a conference in the Dominican Republic. During that week I chose to take the Russian class. We met for about 2.5 hours per day and heard Russian for well above 90% of the time. On Friday, I told a story in Russian. Because I had been drenched in Russian words, the right ones formed themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. One of the conference participants who teaches Russian was in tears of joy because I was effortlessly using “advanced grammar” after such a short time. (I know I’m a fast processor, but this isn’t about me; it’s about the efficacy of the method.)
Later, I was in Spain and consistently found myself uttering the right words when they were needed, even though five minutes earlier my conscious brain couldn’t dredge up the word out of the memory banks. My subconscious had it ready when needed because I had previously been soaked with Spanish words.
Soaking our kids in words. That’s really the entire thing, right there, isn’t it? As long as they are words the kids can understand and want to undertsand. That’s it. We don’t need to make it so complicated.