Now that my vision is clear about grammar acquisition, I can see that grammar, word order, rules of agreement, all that mechanical stuff, is organized in the basement of the house! It happens by itself unconsciously! The conscious mind – the upper floors of the house – can do nothing to organize a language into speech!
When the kids translate a reading text and, in doing so, get the image of a movie in their heads, like they are watching a movie, they are learning how the bricks fit together. And they do it at no particular level but in a natural way.
Whenever the laser pointer of their minds happens to light up the “to” and “which” bricks in the house, it may or may not register consciously – but over time the complex labyrinthine unconscious wiring process does make sense out of it and all of a sudden, after thousands of hours, the kids are reading and speaking without even having to try, masters of relative pronouns.
As Krashen says in Foreign Language Education – The Easy Way:
…the system of grammar, vocabulary, etc. that needs to be acquired is too complex to be learned consciously….(p. 7).
Reading the grammar and allowing the unconscious wiring to organize all the information is wholistic learning. We read the grammar and we get it without using the conscious mind. We do not label each brick in the house as per its grammatical category of relative pronouns or whatever. It is vastly inefficient.
By the time the bricks in the relative pronoun batch are all laid out in worksheets (over a week or ten days, as I remember when I used to believe that schlock and do it in my classroom), the students are vastly confused because they still don’t see what the house looks like at all (they have no idea how the chapter fits into the book, or how that pronoun family of bricks fits into the overall design of the house).