Language Activity Facilitators 3
Jim’s statement:
…or do we redefine ourselves from language teacher to language activity
facilitator…..
can be discussed in terms of reading.
When students read, we want them to read as if they are seeing a movie in their minds. This most complex organizing process can only be done by a supercomputer. I suggest we use our brains.
Our brains want to organize written words in a target language into a series of images, basically a movie, and process that input into a message in the target language. This is called literacy – conscious understanding of a written language – and it is achieved with the involvement of the unconscious mind.
Our brains don’t give a rip about adverb clauses and what individual words translate to individually – they are supercomputers, and they want to gobble up the whole message!
Supercomputers don’t want to be slowed down in any process, reflecting what Jim’s student said after Jim decided to see what would happen in is classroom if he presented some discrete grammar:
“I can’t write and speak as fluently because I’m starting to think about how to say things exactly correctly… it’s slowing me down”….
When our brains can’t do what they were designed to do, because English and grammar terms and translation of individual words are being used in the instruction, they shut down. The screen savers come up fast. There are no language gains. The brain can’t do its thing. We end up with the language classes of today in America.
No wonder kids get so bored in their classes. And no wonder some of them push back and want us to teach using analysis of language in English. It is the only way that they have ever been challenged to learn!
Recently, in the middle of a reading class, one of my brightest students wanted to play Simon Says. I personally felt that there was a ton of compelling comprehensible input going on, but this kid wants an “activity”.
This is what they want to do, Jen, so don’t get too freaked out when you start with comprehensible input tomorrow and the kids can’t handle it. They have to be trained out of their current expectations to be taught a language via language “activities”.
There is a big difference between the vast power of the unconscious mind and the insufficient power of the conscious mind to acquire languages. This conscious analysis of language, the opposite of what Krashen – the provider of the top research in our field for the last thirty years – brings to mind what that Russian teacher who emailed me in March called “structure”, as per:
Dear Sir,
With all due respect, what you wrote … is so false it disgusts me. As a teacher of Russian and one who has mastered this language, to mislead people like this is just wrong. Not only do most people in our country speak our language wrong, but we are far behind the rest of the world in 2nd language acquisition, mostly because of these “fluff” theories. If you are trying to make money selling something, can’t you find something material that will not cloud the common minds. Have you really mastered a second language? If so, I think you are being false to yourself to really believe all this TPR nonsense. Without the structure of the language, nothing is learned, and those who claim that second language learners comprehend as you keep talking in classrooms clearly just enjoy the sound of their own voice because it just doesn’t work without the structure, especially in languages with many inflections.
Yours truly,
A teacher who really teaches