This is a repost from 2009:
I heard somewhere that if you do something, anything, for 10,000 hours you gain mastery of it. It doesn’t matter what it is.
But you gotta do it. You can’t fake do it. So, if it’s learning Lakota, you can’t do worksheets and study a book that talks about the Lakota language (doesn’t that sound funny?) . You listen to somebody who knows Lakota. After 10,000 hours, if the supposed axiom is true, you speak Lakota.
That ties in with the way Krashen is saying, pretty much irrefutably, that, if you read a lot, you get really good at it. The benefits accrue in direct relationship to the time spent doing it. Any other teaching, instruction, reading tips, pedagogical hijinks in the reading classroom amount to very, very little.
If you are a reading teacher and don’t like that because you just spent an entire career coming up with cute little reading techniques to “interest” kids in your lessons, I’m so sorry. It is what it is. In the change that we find ourselves in right now, in the turmoil, there is occurring a complete and utter deconstruction of education and the role of the teacher. Students will always need teachers, but they will need them in much different ways.
I connect what Krashen says about reading to what Susan Gross says about learning the spoken language, that the more students hear the language spoken correctly (this is called grammar), the more they understand its grammar system in all of its neurological complexity, and the closer they get to speaking it, again in direct relationship to the amout of time spent listening to it.
That point about hearing the language spoken properly being grammar is not to be taken lightly. That is real grammar – the unconscious right brain activity of producing correct language without left brain interference, the way TPRS kids do. Teaching grammar in abstract algebraic terms, if you will, is really kind of a sick thing to do. Sick, as in it makes kids want to vomit.
No wonder kids grow up in effortless, non-vomital, relationship to their first language – they hear it for those 10,000 hours in the first years of their life and then naturally (there’s that Krashen word again) output it fluently soon enough in their lives. No vomiting.
Compare that with students in school classrooms who hear it in mixed English form sporadically only for a few hours a week. Failing to speak the target language all the time in class, when considered in this light, becomes a kind of heinous activity by the lazy “grammar based” language teacher. The kids really do have a kind of sick look on their faces if you walk by those sad classrooms. We need to get our act together as language teachers and get as much CI, in either written or spoken form, into our kids. We don’t have a minute to lose.