This post is from 2009:
There is a Carla Bruni song – Quelqu’un M’a Dit:
There is this expression in the song:
à portée de main/within reach
It kept popping up in my mind after listening to the song. I put some shopping bags in my car and there it was. I walked around the side of my house and there it was. I looked at a rain gutter on my house and there it was. It seemed to only percolate up when my mind was focusing on other, somewhat mindless, things.
My mind clearly liked this phrase. It was offering it to me over and over, like a dog requesting to have a ball thrown for it to chase:
à portée de main…
à portée de main…
à portée de main…
à portée de main…
It is a very fine phrase in French, to be sure. I so much enjoyed each unannounced appearance, each time it floated up into my conscious mind. I felt glad to know French in those moments, its sound.
In what form was the phrase offered? It always showed up first in the form of sound, but then, instantly after I heard it in my mind, I could also see it, about a split second later, if I gave it my attention.
With each appearance of this most French phrase, something in my mind communicated to me the idea that this sound that I was getting to listen to in these little moments, these little messages from my deeper mind, were a form of beauty.
I have always known that language is a source of beauty, even though Saint-Exupéry once qualified that in Le Petit Prince with the very accurate statement:
le langage est source de malentendus/language is a source of misunderstanding
One given to meditation would say that my mind was trying to tell me something. Jungian thinkers would tell me that, like dreams, these were letters from my deeper mind that I could choose to open if I wanted.
But, after about the fifth or sixth time that day of hearing/seeing this beautiful phrase, my mind started thinking about the Natural Order of Acquisition Hypothesis and how the mind is selective and learns what features of a language it wants to learn when it wants to learn it.
When it wants to learn it….
Yup, that’s what I thought of. That day my mind was clearly into learning, hearing, snacking on, à portée de main. I was getting free reps all through the afternoon. The unconscious mind doesn’t charge for its wares.
I wasn’t connecting any of this free and beautiful French lesson to a grade. I wasn’t being judged on whether I learned it or not.
I wonder… if we just speak to our kids and let their deeper minds (certainly this must be where real language acquisition hangs out, in the deeper end of the pool)….if we just speak to them, letting their own deeper minds do the selecting of what they want to learn from the smorgasboard of CI we offer them in our CI classes, maybe that would help in change the horrible last hundred years of shitty language teaching in our schools.
And maybe we could tone down the assessment thing. Now, most of us assess with just enough FORCE to do the emotional equivalent of walloping a child up side the head with a board but not hard enough to knock them out because we need them in class the next day.
God goes to the trouble of designing a natural language acquisition device in our brains – all we need to do is hear the language and, as a bonus, read it and like it – so that language can emerge naturally, beautifully, without any stress whatsoever, and all we have to do is hear the language in various forms like Bruni’s song in this case, and then we go and design a grammar syllabus. Excuse me?
Before Krashen, this kind of talk would certainly have gotten me labeled as a nut, and I am a nut, at least sometimes I feel like a nut, but now, with each bit of non-targeted CI (Krashen’s new term from this summer) that all of us clumsily try to share with our students each day in our classes, Krashen’s ideas are becoming more and more, a little bit more, shall we say, with a little French laugh, à portée de main….