There are some kids who do well on the AP exam in spite of not hearing the language in the classroom. These are the very few kids in each room, not even four percenters but more like 0.4 percenters, who can pass such exams.
But such kids only give the impression of acquisition. When they are prepared for the exam, they learn but do not acquire. They learn how to write, for example, but their writing is stilted and reflects a jagged analytical edge – it certainly doesn’t reflect the kind of writing we find in native speakers. It is the difference between a rock and a diamond.
The AP people, ever ready to make a profit, give the kid a 3 or even a 4 to these kids for their and their teachers’ valiant efforts over many years, but the actual product is bad. It can’t pass for acquisition unless it is a product of hundreds and hundreds of input, so that the AP exam is really very deceptive in its results.
The other 99.6% of kids taught without comprehensible input emerge with practically nothing after four years. I am currently teaching a level 3/4 class that is filled with bright kids who know absolutely no French. It’s almost unbelievable. It actually is unbelievable. I’m not alone on that one, as many here have made similar comments.
I use common level 1 words all the time that these “upper level” kids do not understand, even when I write them on the board. That is because those words are buried in a concrete vault of memorized words that are no more available than anything else trapped in concrete. Their teacher, a wonderful person, often suggests to me that compromise between the methods is possible. I change the subject.
I don’t apologize for the extreme nature of the above statements, nor do I apologize for the extreme nature of the comments about the use of grammar instruction in the classroom made here recently:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/11/08/i-am-a-fuddyduddy/
Grammar instruction (the false kind that uses grammatical terminology), games, activities, computer generated instruction and all like that doesn’t work in secondary schools. We have to get that. We create so much for our classrooms that we view as good planning, but, if it is addressed to the conscious mind, all it does is destroy the power of the real process of language acquisition, which really does only occur in the unconscious mind.
We need to stop planning and start providing interesting and meaningful comprehensible input in the form of listening and reading to our students. If you do that, you will see something. If you read this blog with a kind of internal qualifying thought that what we describe and talk about here can be mixed with other methods, you won’t find what you are looking for in your instruction and you are wasting your time. Better to leave the group – you can’t mix this stuff with the old stuff.
