Below is a repost of a recent article by James, with some additions by me. I would like to call the first article “James’ Great Argument Against the Modern Argument Against CI in Schools 1” or jGA 1 for short. This article I would like to call “James’ Great Argument Against the Modern Argument Against CI in Schools 2” or jGA 2 for short. I hope that is o.k. with the group. I know it’s weird. But I see these two jGA posts as potentially up there with jGR inimportance, and in my experience in this PLC, when really kick ass articles don’t have a simple catchy title, they get forgotten, and this is one set of ideas I don’t want to forget where I can find, hence “jGA”.)
1) They say: The mind doesn’t have a special capacity (LAD) for learning language. Thus, language needs to be taught like other skills. So lots of practice at “skill building” is fitting and even necessary. I say: The mind has a capacity to learn a language but the way it chooses to do it is unknown to us because it takes place in the unconscious and therefore we have no control over it. By focusing on the message and not the words, thus transferring the process of learning the language to the deeper mind, we learn the language in a way that we cannot consciously understand or even talk about and certainly in a way whose order we could predict. Therefore, in class we need only provide as much comprehensible input as possible – that is all we need to do.
2) Their point: The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) – which states that we learn languages best and most naturally before a certain biological age – is accurate. The CPH “turns off” at a certain point in life. High school students are beyond the critical period and lack the LAD and so must be instructed in the language, instead of experiencing it. My point: Learning a language is and was meant to be a life long process. People can learn a language at any point in their life as long as they hear and read enough of it. It’s not like in history adults over the age of 30 who have immigrated to another country have never learned the language – they have. Now if you want to talk about accent, that is another thing.
3) Their point: Teenagers are more capable of making gains by thinking about language because their first language can act as a point of reference. High schoolers are more capable of learning by thinking and doing. They can hold on to the grammar and vocabulary and manipulate things and think about them and from those things fluency will eventually come. My point: When the conscious mind is involved in language, it can never be acquired – it can only be learned about. Again, it cannot be acquired. Moreover, those who can learn it are only a very small percent of the student population. (There is not much of a response a traditional teacher can make to refute this point – they are fully aware of their immense (and documented) failings in retention of students over what was intended by the school to be a contiguous four year program for ALL their students from ninth grade. All they need to do is look at the 8 white girls and 4 white boys in their level four classes to see the proof of their hypocrisy in favoring kids who have been trained in conscious analysis and are masters of that game through their privileged status in society.)
4) Their point: Authentic resources are the best possible vehicle to deliver input to students. Foreign language teachers need to expose their students to the culture and so the language encountered in class ideally will have written by a member of the “target culture.” So we need more magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc. written by native French speakers from France, for example. My point: Students who have not acquired the language via comprehensible input cannot read those texts because authentic reading of authentic texts emerges from an extremely complex series of unconscious processes that occur in the deeper mind over years, processes that no human man could have designed that are connected to having heard the language in massive amounts first. By not providing enough auditory comprehensible input, the teacher who expects real measurable results in the reading of authentic texts is just wrong.