Language acquisition is an unconscious process. As Krashen said to me, “What don’t they get about that?”
Apparently they don’t get any of it. The fact is, if we are language acquisition specialists, then we should be providing language acquisition that engages the unconscious minds of our students. If we are not doing that, then, by definition, we are engaging the conscious minds of our students. Or, even worse, mixing the two. That doesn’t work. You can’t learn a language by thinking about it.
How about a reality check here everyone? Do we or do we not mix our instruction with English? If this is true, and it is true for me, then we are not doing TPRS or CI based instruction. What are we doing? Not much of anything, really. But it’s not TPRS.
Either we do it the unconscious/whole brain/right brain way, getting our students focused on the meaning and the message instead of on the individual words, or we do it the conscious/analytical/left brain way. That is to say, either we do it the right way or the wrong way.
We can’t do both. In fact, I consider it actually cruel to involve the kids in some short amount of cool and pure CI targeted directly to their unconscious/right brain/real language acquisition place, but then give in right there in class to the ego driven wish to explain some grammar point or tell our class what we had for dinner last night in English, or to make some stupid joke that nobody gets.
To repeat: I think that is cruel to switch out of cool and pure CI and into analyis and/or use of English that is completley off task, because in the moments of those switchings back and forth, our students are forced to change their brain activity from the CI to an entirely different non-language acquisition place and then back.
Would you do that to your car? Would you put it in drive and then reverse and then drive and then reverse thirty times over a 50 minute period of time? That wouldn’t help the car’s transmission, its engine, and in fact would wear it out quite quickly.
So also with our students, they get worn out shifting hemispheres of their brains by language teachers who in most cavalier and mildly hubristic fashion don’t get that our students can’t learn a language by thinking about it.
Be careful when you become a teacher. You are not dealing with junk. God doesn’t make junk, to quote Terry Cole-Whittaker. We must remember what/who we are working with.