What our kids do when they hear a story or just do PQA is they use the vastly superior technology of the human brain to create movies of what is being said. By focusing on the message, the medium is acquired. So it is in reading.
Now, if the conscious mind is involved in this process, the brain gets confused. It has the technology at the level of the unconscious mind to easily handle all input as long as it is comprehensible, but it keeps getting interference from the petty and annoying involvement of the conscious analytical faculty. So the the deeper mind, the super computer, shuts down, since it is not being asked to do step aside, and only snippets of the movie can be watched.
This has been proven for decades by teachers who merely facilitate language activities. Such teachers’ failure to reach even a few kids tells the story. Schools with two thousand students who have AP programs with five or six kids in them tell all.
And what those five or six achieve is highly questionable, since they have been prepared for a test in a conscious manner and have relatively little of the language actually there in the unconscious mind, where languages hide.
This explains what I consider to be the entire split in methods. The failure of language activity facilitators to let the process of language acquisition be one that takes place in the realm of the unconscious mind, where language has ever and will ever take place, is the key to understanding the rifts in buildings, the animosities, the mistrust by language activity facilitators of people who instruct purely from Krashen’s research.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
