Here is the draft from Robert:
In a recent discussion with other teachers, one of the participants expressed the following opinion in opposing Teaching with Comprehensible Input: “If you teach like a baby learns its first language, your students won’t say their first word for two-and-a-half to three years.”
While the statement indicates a number of things about the beliefs and practices of the speaker in relation to teaching a foreign language, of greater importance are the traps in thinking and reasoning that the statement reveals. The statement is the result of falling into at least eight traps. They are as follows:
- The first trap is equating Route and Rate. While the route of acquisition may be the same for acquisition of first, second, third, or twentieth languages, the rate is not. Nor is the rate the same for every learner. There are of course, many reasons for this, including but not limited to the following: infant production depends on the development of motor skills, but older children, teens, and adults already have these motor skills and need only refine them; neurologically, learning and acquisition depend on the establishment and strengthening of neural pathways, so infants begin with extreme brain plasticity but few established neural pathways, whereas older learners already have many established neural pathways – both a boon and a bane; language processing occurs in part in Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, parts of the brain that need to be developed in infants but are already developed to one degree or another in older learners. Perhaps an analogy will help to understand this: If I am driving alone at night on a winding one-lane dirt road with no lighting for the first time, I will not drive very fast because I am finding my way. The second time I drive on the same road, I will travel a bit faster. If I then drive it again in daylight, I will drive even faster. If the road is widened and paved, I will travel much faster. The Route did not change, but the Rate certainly did. Establishing and strengthening neural pathways is analogous: the more often they are traveled, the faster and stronger they become.
- The second trap is a misunderstanding of the nature of language and assuming that acquisition of each new language must begin from ground zero. This simply is not true. As Wolfgang Butzkamm puts it, “You only learn language once.” What we call “languages” are really only dialects of language. Thus, once a person has acquired Language, learning languages is merely adding new information to what has already been acquired; it is not starting again from the very beginning.
- The third trap is confusing formal grammar with mental representation. Bill Van Patten, a leading second language acquisition researcher, summarizes a great deal of research when he states that learners acquire a language by creating a mental representation of the language, but this mental representation does not correspond to or resemble the rules of grammar presented in a textbook.
- The fourth trap is Ignoring or being ignorant of recent research that shows the efficacy of Teaching with Comprehensible Input. As Wynne Wong of Ohio State University puts it, “A flood of input must precede a trickle of output.” Stephen Krashen, James Asher, Tracy Terrell, and many others have established that comprehensible input is the single most important element in language acquisition. Even those who believe that some output (Output Hypothesis) or interpersonal exchange (Interaction Hypothesis) is necessary for acquisition recognize the primacy of comprehensible input for acquisition. All second language researchers agree that without quality messages that are understandable, interesting – even compelling – and personalized to learners, acquisition does not occur, though some learning in the form of memorization might. However, acquisition is long term whereas memorization in the classroom setting is generally short term. The World Language Content Standards for California Public Schools Kindergarten through Grade Twelve state that our students can no longer afford to learn about languages (i.e. rules of grammar, essentially courses in linguistics) but must learn languages for use in communicative settings.
- The fifth trap is thinking that acquisition is linear and follows from deductive reasoning rather than experience and induction. This is not true. Researchers remind us regularly that acquisition is non-linear, progresses at different rates for different aspects of language as well as for different individuals, and often involves a “step backward”: just before a language breakthrough, a learner’s speech may actually become simpler; when a new concept or element is being incorporated into a learner’s mental representation, an earlier element may appear to get worse; in moments of stress, learners may revert to something from an earlier stage of acquisition.
- The sixth trap is thinking that acquisition depends on attention to forms. Some researchers see a place for attention to form in the sense of drawing attention to linguistic features that learners already employ communicatively, i.e. they can already manipulate the language and know what it means. Focus on FormS, on the other hand, focuses explicitly and solely on the language features and is perhaps best represented by the Grammar-Translation and Audio-Lingual Methods. The concept of Focus on Form arose because of the lack of evidence for Focus on FormS, i.e. nothing shows that this actually works in terms of language acquisition. The third position, which rests on anecdotal and study evidence, is that attention to meaning alone is efficacious in language acquisition. The situation is this: Focus on Meaning and Focus on Form both have evidence that indicates they lead to language acquisition, the debate being which is more efficacious; there is no evidence that Focus on FormS leads to acquisition.
- The seventh trap is thinking that Semantic Sets provide the best and fastest method of organizing material for acquisition. Research has shown that this is not so; in fact, receiving vocabulary items in a randomly determined order is faster because of interference between and among semantically similar items in sets.
- The eighth trap is thinking that language consists of “Building Blocks” that, if learned individually, can be fitted together to create fluency and achieve acquisition. Research in many areas has shown this to be false. For example, just in the area of listening comprehension, Stephen Camarata, Professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt, describes how working on isolated skills such as intonation patterns and phonemic awareness does not lead to increased listening comprehension, merely greater facility in the isolated skills. If a learner is to acquire the whole language, then the learner must be presented with language as a whole, not bits and pieces of it. Dialogic Reading is much more efficacious for listening comprehension than skills practice because the learner deals with natural language in a broad context and receives input that leads to acquisition.
As a result of falling into at least some of these traps and using them as the basis for the statement in opposition to Teaching with Comprehensible Input, the speaker has created a straw man to attack, and this neither furthers genuine discussion nor benefits anyone, least of all our students.