A follow-up to points made in the previous post:
1. The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis: Conscious learning about a language, including memorizing and learning and manipulating grammar paradigms, is a separate process in the brain than unconsciously acquiring a language. In order to build long-lasting proficiency, where using the language to communicate (take in and produce meaningful, comprehensible messages) is the goal, teachers must teach for acquisition, not learning. Acquired proficiency comes from our internal mental representation of the language, a linguistic system we build in our minds, not from learned facts, lists, and formulae.
2. The Comprehension Hypothesis: Understanding comprehensible messages (in spoken and, for literate students, written form) is the cause of language acquisition. There is no other way to feed the Language Acquisition Device (posited by linguist Noam Chomsky) the data that it needs to build a mental representation of the language.
3. The Monitor Hypothesis: The Monitor is our self-editing, or self-correcting function. It is useful for helping us produce grammatically-correct writing or correct speech. However, the Monitor can also impede our willingness to take risks and try using language. In the beginning stages of language acquisition, teachers should focus on communicating, not accuracy, and avoid correcting students’ attempts at output.
4. The Affective Filter Hypothesis: Language is best acquired when students are relaxed and focused on something interesting and pleasant. A classroom environment that keeps affective filters low, thus, is key for optimal language acquisition to occur. This suggests that we need to make all our students feel as comfortable and successful as possible, celebrate success, smile at them, and cultivate a warm, relaxed, focused, and stress-free environment.
5. The Natural Order Hypothesis: Certain features of languages are acquired in a natural order that cannot be changed by instruction. Students can learn about features of the language (e.g. the difference between the verbs ser and estar or how to form the past tenses) in any order, but true acquisition of the features is not under our conscious control.
We conclude from the above that students progress along the natural order in the same order, but at different paces. We should thus provide our classes with the most complex language that they can still understand (which in the beginning is provided at a very slow pace, with lots of scaffolding such as drawings or translations or visual aids), so that students at all their different stages along the natural order of acquisition can all take linguistic data that helps them to grow their mental representation of the language.