The deeper mind learns the language. It is too complex for the conscious mind. We know that. We just don’t pay much attention to that crucial fact.
Most language teachers in the world don’t want that to be true. If it were true, they would have to change. And yet it is true. We learn languages unconsciously by focusing on the message and not the words, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/07/31/we-focus-on-the-water/
Conscious left hemisphere dominant instruction is fine, required even, in classes in which the mode of learning is conscious, like history. But not for languages. We now know that conscious analysis of language doesn’t work, hasn’t worked, and will never work. The process must be made unconscious.
How does this fact influence our choice of what to teach in a comprehension based classroom? Well, if we choose too many words to teach, like more than three in one class period, we end up giving the conscious mind too much to chew on and it takes over. The conscious mind likes to chew on things. That’s called school. But the conscious mind should not be allowed to take over in a language class.
This conscious focus on the language – on its words and how they fit together like a big jigsaw puzzle – subverts the real way we learn languages. So what we should do is give the conscious mind something to occupy itself with, those three words or structures, while we flood the unconscious minds of our students with properly spoken speech in the target language (grammar), where the real process of acquisition can take place. How?
We just keep repeating the three structures over and over and over during class in different ways that keep the attention of the kids’ conscious minds on the three words, throwing it a bone, so to speak, but keeping it from messing with the real process going on in the classroom – the unconscious process. In one class, I took a class of 41 students through 96 repetitions of the word “scolds”.
I asked the kids if their parents scolded them (making sure that they knew that they were to offer only lighthearted, cute, humorous answers) and we ended up with one girl whose parents scolded her at dinner but not at breakfast or lunch and I also shared that my teachers scolded me when I was in military high school.
Then, I added in a second structure (from “Table Manners Part 2” by Anne Matava) and we were talking about how kids got scolded for “eating like an animal”. One kid got scolded for eating like a giraffe and another for eating like a cow. Stuff like that where the focus by the kids’ conscious minds was only on those two structures as they were repeated in class over and over and over in various ways.
But what was really happening? All the other words that I was saying, 90% of the lesson, being too much for the kids’ conscious minds to absorb, was going into their unconscious minds for later processing during sleep. I was really filling their deeper minds with much more of the language than they were aware of.
Then, in deep sleep, the mind takes everything it heard that day and either rejects or accepts what it heard that day. It is the way we acquire languages. Some of what we heard, if we heard it enough, is accepted, and some, being too complex or not having been repeated enough or not being interesting enough, is rejected. Over time, the language is formed in that way.
So the deeper mind must be allowed to do its work. We can’t mess with it. We must keep our kids’ minds focused on those few words. While our students are busy looking at a few stars, we are tricking them into absorbing the entire night sky around them. But if they try to look at too many stars at once with their conscious mind, they can’t absorb all that, and the system fails. There are too many stars.
I might add that this is the problem with forced speech too early in language acquisition. People don’t fully appreciate what the so-called Silent Period is. It is not silent at all, but it is silent to the conscious mind. We can’t even begin to understand all the things that go on in the unconsious mind of a student who is well focused during a comprehension based class. A symphony of complex neurological connections is being made in every second of class when a student is fully listening to the target language spoken to them in various and interesting and personalized ways.
But what happens when we force that process of speech where the kid speaks before they are ready? We then call in the attention of the conscious mind into the process of speech creation. But it takes thousands of hours for the speech connections to be made from the rich bed of language that has been put into the deeper mind over thousands of hours of listening to emerge in true (not memorized or parroted) speech. We can’t speed that process up any more than we can force a road to be built from Seattle to Miama in a few weeks when years are required to build the road because of the distance involved. Can a child learn her first language via force?
This is the problem I have with people who advocate forced speech in children. It’s man messing with nature, and it rarely works. That is why the most sacred things that happen in life, the formation of a human being, the creation of a language system, all occur out of reach of human meddling.
We have lots of research supporting the above position. Where is the research supporting the position that forced speech works?