I repost this from time to time; it first appeared in TPRS in a Year! –
For thousands of years, children learned languages by listening to them. Their listening was the exact right curriculum for them, and the word “curriculum” was never even mentioned. Meaningful speech that they could understand with zero effort was all that they knew, so the languages, even in complex forms, were easy for them.
By the time they were five years old or thereabouts, their mastery of the language was relatively complete and yet they had never once worried about why or how it had all happened. If fact they never gave it a thought.
The fact is that children learn how to understand and speak languages without their conscious minds being involved at all, as if by magic. Adults would say things to them that had meaning. They would look the children in the eyes, tell them stories, pausing if they didn’t understand, and look for their reaction, often while smiling and laughing and perhaps singing them songs, and, on a good day, even chanting. In that way, language glued them children to life.
Because adults asked them lots of questions about things that mattered to them, the kids learned the language because they cared about what was being discussed, not because they cared about learning the language. They learned the language automatically as a result of wanting to know what was being said to them.
Then, for the first time since they started learning languages, in schools, kids found that they could be wrong. Adults in schools didn’t use the language to talk to the kids about things that were interesting to them. They started talking to them about the actual language itself, how it was built, what an adverb was, and what a stem-changing verb is. It was like teaching kids how to play soccer without the ball. This threw most kids for a loop.
The more that kids were forced to analyze the language, and then on top of that take tests on how well they could memorize lists of words and grammar rules or on how much they could listen for the words they were supposed to learn, the more convinced they became that they were bad at learning languages. They saw that their success in school depended on their ability to grasp things that were seriously boring to all but a few of them.
This way of doing things had predictable results. Kids didn’t learn the language. Many gave up and put their heads on their desks. It all felt wrong to them, especially the low grades on the tests and the fact that they couldn’t say anything in the language, even after years of study. Their only conclusion was that they weren’t very capable of learning a language.
But then researchers and teachers started appearing towards the latter part of the last century who claimed that languages can be learned, if only the learner’s focus was put on the message and not on the language itself.
This was a breakthrough idea and one that exactly describes the way it had been done before the schools got a hold of the process, back in the days when the community gathered by the fire. The kids were so interested in the message being shared that the kids not once thought that they were even learning a language.
The overarching term for this more traditional and humane way of learning languages, before schools changed the rules on the kids, is a “natural approach to teaching languages”, the main feature of which is comprehensible input.
When you use comprehensible input, your students learn the language in the natural way.