Jen said:
…Isn’t every class a mixed level? Aren’t there really no such things as “levels” anyway?….
John said this:
…this statement from Jen’s recent post I think deserves to be a post on its own, because it really touches on the the assumptions most teachers, parents and administrators hold. How many of us are still holding onto assumptions about levels, based on the notion that we can measure and control the order of acquisition?
The problem of ridding ourselves of the idea that there are levels, is figuring out what to do next. Also, how do we teach effectively within a framework that relies upon artificial and sometimes unjust level divisions, and which will resist our attempts at collapsing those boundaries? I’m not even sure levels aren’t a bad thing, but right or wrong, Jen’s comment is a great starting point for an interesting and necessary discussion….
My comment is that it is not a complex issue. If we get a group of adults together as Elissa and others are doing, they don’t have the same exposure to the language and yet it works. It’s about whether they want to learn, not about how much exposure to the language they’ve had.
Malcolm Gladwell in Outliars claims that mastery is merely a result of 10.000 hours of doing something. If a person were to absorb 9.000 hours of comprehensible input out of, say, 10.000 to which they were exposed, they would have near native mastery.
The output, which seemed non-existent in the first 500 hours, would be there. If the person had read a lot, as well, the writing would be there. It would all be the result of the powerful role of the unconscious mind’s incredible organizing ability. The conscious mind will have had little role in any of it, as long as the input was there and comprehensible.
The resistance to this fact of comprehensible input just goes to prove how entrenched the human ego can be. The old-style teachers of language and their analytical/eclectic delivery methods are basically full of shit, is the only way I know how to say it. We just don’t CI to eye.