A Brilliant Step Forward
Prior to Blaine Ray’s application in the form of TPRS in the 1990’s of Dr. Stephen Krashen’s groundbreaking research, foreign languages classes at all levels from the elementary to the university level were mostly taught from the textbook.
But Krashen’s research has shown that people don’t acquire languages by focusing on grammar and by memorizing lists of isolated words, but rather by focusing rather on the meaning of what they hear and read. All that is required for our students to acquire the language is that they be interested in what they are hearing and reading. Then, the language acquisition process happens naturally, without manipulation and planning on our parts.
We don’t need to plan conversations. All we need to do in the first few years is (1) speak to them in ways that they can understand, and (2) give them interesting things to read that they can understand without effort. With enough of this kind of easily understood and interesting input, speech and writing output naturally will follow in the so-called upper level classes, just as happens with small children later in their first language.
Prior to Blaine Ray’s application in the form of TPRS in the 1990’s of Dr. Stephen Krashen’s groundbreaking research, foreign languages classes at all levels from the elementary to the university level were mostly taught from the textbook.
But Krashen’s research has shown that people don’t acquire languages by focusing on grammar and by memorizing lists of isolated words, but rather by focusing rather on the meaning of what they hear and read. All that is required for our students to acquire the language is that they be interested in what they are hearing and reading. Then, the language acquisition process happens naturally, without manipulation and planning on our parts.
We don’t need to plan conversations. All we need to do in the first few years is (1) speak to them in ways that they can understand, and (2) give them interesting things to read that they can understand without effort. With enough of this kind of easily understood and interesting input, speech and writing output naturally will follow in the so-called upper level classes, just as happens with small children later in their first language.
The key in Krashen’s formula is that the student not be conscious of focusing in an intellectual way on the language, on all its different parts of speech and how things are spelled, etc. Rather, the process requires that the student be focused on the meaning of the message and not on the vehicle for its delivery.
Most language teachers now know that their students are much better served when their attention in class is put on understanding the message and not on the grammatical details that form its structure, which involves thinking. You have to be out of your mind to learn a language.
As my teacher Susan Gross has said, language teachers need only “talk to their kids”. When they do this, they are rewarded in ways that they could never have anticipated before their discovery of comprehensible input.