In a recent comment here, Jim Tripp said:
…or do we redefine ourselves from language teacher to language activity facilitator…..
Then he said:
…personally, I’d rather let them facilitate their own language activities (at school OR at home), and save my efforts for the real L2 acquisition work of delivering quality CI….
Then Nathan gave some kick ass examples of what his kids could do with all the comprehensible input that they have heard and read this year.
In their comments to the Anne Matava post
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/04/07/talking-with-anne/comment-page-1/#comment-19701
Jim and Bryce and Nathan are basically saying that real acquisition comes from the students hearing and reading the language in ways that they understand, and that everything else, what Jim calls doing language activities, is fluff and not the best use of instructional time.
In this respect, I call out the Russian teacher who called what we do “fluff”:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/03/06/with-all-due-respect/
The problem – a most serious one – with his argument is that kids who don’t experience meaningful comprehensible input – which is a function of the unconscious mind – don’t actually acquire languages. They are able to manipulate aspects of the language in limited ways after years of study, but they can’t actually use the language.
It only appears as if some of them learn – even the four percenters don’t acquire much. They may learn, but they don’t acquire. They may be able to talk about, but they can’t use.
This is proof that a hundred years of facilitating language activities – Jim’s term is brilliant – has resulted in, at best, extremely limited results with extremely few kids.
At worst, it has turned off hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of kids to languages, making them feel, as so many adults report years later, that they “aren’t very good at languages”.
The idea that they are not really language teachers would be a big shock for most language activity facilitators. Those who are open enough, whose hearts are open, who are willing to take the leap off the high dive into the ocean of new facts brought by Krashen, would be awakened by the impact of the dive and the coldness of the water.
But, if we want to swim deep, we have to go into the deeper, much colder water, into the middle of the ocean. We can’t play around in the kiddie pool for our entire careers.
God bless those who are willing to look at, not shut down about, this change from language acquisition being a completely conscious activity to an unconscious one.
As four percenters themselves, those language activity facilitators entered the field of teaching primarily because they were good at it, and if they could do it, then, they reasoned, they could teach it.
At the end of four years, however, only 4 or 5 of every 100 freshmen who start out with language activity facilitators can claim any results, and those results I would highly question, having been one of those language activity facilitators in South Carolina for a quarter of a century before discovering the work of Krashen and Blaine Ray through Suan Gross when I moved to Colorado in 2000.
When I started to really delve into Krashen’s research, those language activities that I had put on my students for so many years not only started to look really stupid but also explained the incredible sense of frustration, malaise, and dislike (more like hatred) of my job that characterized my career in teaching up to that point and thank you Dale Crum for getting me down to Colorado Springs that year because I was about to quit.
Krashen took away the ball of the language activity facilitators and carried it over to a different field, one with a level playing field, and showed us how all kids are wired to learn a language, if only given the right setting.
What is that setting, the setting of real language teaching vs. facilitating language activities? It is the realm of the unconscious mind.