Just focusing on delivering comprehensible messages to our students helps us ease into a state of flow in our classes. Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests in his Forgetting Hypothesis that students should forget that they are listening to messages in another language. This forgetting that the messages are in another language clears a path for the language to move directly into students’ unconscious minds, where acquisition occurs.
On the other hand, targeting words from lists or thematic units sends the message to the students that we have an objective for the conscious mind – to learn the day’s structures. When we do that, we focus on learning and not on acquiring the language.
There are no daily structures when languages are learned in a completely natural way, and yet the structures are acquired. All this happens without stress or interference from the conscious mind. The conscious mind is the enemy of language acquisition. Free and natural communication blazes a trail to authentic acquisition, bypassing the conscious mind.
The authors have found that natural speech using language that emerges from the need for communication allows us to focus more completely on students’ ideas. This has built incredible community and student engagement in our classrooms.
