Let’s teach buildings! Let’s teach Garnier’s Opera House in Paris. We can walk around the outside of that building for three hours and barely begin to get what is on those exterior walls. And then we can go inside for the Chagall ceiling and for wonderful stories. And then we can hang out studying the staircases that got us into the building. And, of course, we can always go around back to see where the king came in. Or we can go around front and watch a mime up in the air on one of the pedestals in front of the building.
If we were to take that building apart and lay all the bricks and marble and statuary and magnificent work done by hands that are gone now but still live on in the form of that building,we would have no idea that it could be assembled into the Paris Opera House. We would think that it was just a bunch of building materials.
What Susan Gross says about reading, as it applies to this brick house argument, is important:
…acquisition occurs only when the learner is focused entirely on meaning, not on structure. So if the text is interesting enough to grab their attention, then students may enter the “flow” of reading. It is being in the “flow” that produces acquisition. If reading a novel in class, the students should simply translate aloud while the teacher maintains the pace and immediately supplies the translation of unfamiliar phrases. The “flow” of the story should not be interrupted….
Susie is saying no less than that we must absolutely stop studying bricks laying around on the ground and start looking at how we can – via comprehensible input – make the bricks fit together in the finished product of the house. Only when we do this do the students focus on meaning (the building) and not words (bricks).