Diana shared recently here that we in DPS are considering dropping the speaking part of our yearly assessments. That is a good thing. Speech output just happens. It can’t be taught because it happens as a result of ultra-sophisticated neural processes that occur in the deeper mind and not because of any conscious thinking we can do to produce it.
Those language producing processes of the deeper mind shame the computing rates of a computer, but the programming takes a long time – many many years – to get all set up. I don’t see the need to rush it, especially in kids who are taking a class in a school and who don’t see the need.
Yet, some teachers still force speech from their kids when in a four year program they less than 500 hours available to them and in a four year program they probably use under 200 of those hours for actual auditory comprehensible input.
To then expect speech output to happen in their students – when only a fraction of the time necessary to produce natural, authentic and flowing output (at least 5,000 hours is my opinion) – is daft. But, because they are teachers, they feel as if they need to “produce” something measurable in their students (it’s what teachers do), and so, in order to create the illusion of learning, they have their kids memorize things to say in the language. But the things memorized aren’t real language production, but mere mimicry, and are mostly forgotten, so what was accomplished in that class?
In administering the test to a level one student last week, I was given an example of what marvelous things can happen if we just leave the outputting process alone and continue non-stop with the input. (In my French 1 class this year I did virtually no practice in speaking or writing, so this was a particularly fine proof of comprehensible input for me.)
The student chose a panel with four frames describing a party attended by a boy and a girl. In the second frame the two were dancing. The student began to describe that frame to me in French:
…ils commencent à danser/they begin to dance….
Now that may not seem like a big deal, but it is a colossal statement of what happens if we just leave the process of speech output alone. Had the student been trained in the old way, with little auditory input and tons of writing, he may have said something more like:
…ils commencer de danse…./they to begin of dancing…
In the correct version, my student’s deeper mind orchestrated the following things in the split second that he looked at that frame:
1. He didn’t pronounce the “s” on ils/they (not done in French when followed by a consonant), even though he knew he was describing more than one person.
2. He didn’t pronounce the “ent” on the verb, because they don’t in French, again even though he knew he wasn’t describing just one person.
3. Amazingly, he knew to use the preposition “à” in the sentence. He didn’t have to memorize a big list of which prepositions go with which verbs like I had to in college, which did nothing for me anyway because the list was too long for me to access instantly anything from it when trying to speak French after I memorized it.
4. He correctly used and pronounced the infinitive form of the verb “to dance”.
None of those things could have been reasoned out by and produced by the monitor in less than 30 seconds or so, at the fastest. All the grammar was instantly arranged by the deeper mind. The student may not have been able to write it correctly, but he was able to say it.
Was the rest of the panel described with such accuracy? Of course not, as this is a French 1 student. It is very possible that, in the general awkwardness of the oral description of the overall panel, I may have missed the elegance of the sentence he used to describe what was happening in the second panel.
We tend to do that as teachers – miss the good stuff and tell the kids what they are doing wrong. But, in this one very fine moment where I had spent a year doing nothing but speech and reading input with this class, I had a small but dramatic instant of proof that what Krashen says about speech production is true. It’s those small successes that can make a year.