In the past century, teachers would take a batch of bricks, grammar points arranged in chapters in books, and, laboriously, each day, boldly, inflict a kind of analytical pain session on the kids about the nature of that particular brick. They thought that they were building a grammar foundation for the kids to base their eventual mastery of the language on. That is a very stupid plan.
Moreover, the batch of bricks, the chapters in the book teaching the grammar, were also presented in very capricious order. Object pronouns were considered far too dangerous for beginning students. The past tense verb forms were certainly taboo for kids new to the language. Relative pronouns and the subjunctive mood? Forget about it!
And yet, as Susan Gross tells us in her workshops, when people ask kids how their trip to Grandma’s last weekend was, they don’t go up to them and lean over and say, “Oh, kids, how is your trip to Grandma’s? Are you having a good time?”
Krashen’s Natural Order Hypothesis essentially states that there is a natural pre-determined order in which we acquire language structures (grammar) that cannot be altered. If this is accurate, and it is, then the way chapters in a book are ordered becomes totally useless and in conflict with this natural, ordered plan that is already wired into the brain.
So, in the “relative pronouns” brick presented in the level 2 and 3 books (can you imagine not using or studying “to which” or “of whom” until three years into your study of a language?), then the teacher would take the “to” brick and lay it next to the “which” brick on the ground and talk for as much as a class period or more, with worksheets on possible arrangements of the “to” brick and the “which” brick, always mentioning, cautioning, what happens when the “at” brick gets involved and if it’s a thing or a person or whatever.
to be continued…