I apologize if in the previous article on repetitions I offended any of the more data oriented readers here by suggesting that a person needs more like 28,000 reps on a structure to acquire it, and not 2,000. How do I know, right?
But how does the data person know? It’s impossible to measure the needs of the unconscious language acquisition system/device using conscious analytical methods. The left brain cannot measure the right brain.
So I think that I am justified in saying that no one knows how many repetitions are needed to acquire a certain structure except that it is a lot. My position in this second article on repetitions is that because so many more reps are needed than we have any idea, then the number probably doesn’t matter, because all people acquire languages at different speeds anyway and they all possess different levels of motivation, so to standardize the process (i.e. put a bunch of people in one room and expect them to learn at the same rate of speed) cannot work.
So what are we supposed to do, lengthen the duration of foreign language classes in schools once somebody who claims to be a language expert finds the magic number of reps needed for certain structures to be acquired, and as soon as that expert finds as well the right order for those structures to be presented? I don’t think I’ll wait around for that to happen because I am one of those Krashen hippies who firmly believes that we cannot organize the acquisition of languages into a neat package anymore than we can fly to the moon on jet packs.
We can’t know how many reps are necessary and what order of presentation is necessary and that is the end of it. Each individual is unique in how fast they acquire and how motivated they are to acquire. And the job is done by the unconscious language acquisition system/device in four to six years anyway, somehow the job gets done, so why do we worry so much about number of reps and order of acquisition? (It actually is magic and therefore not something we can figure out.)
I therefore suggest that we kind of need to stop trying to control how fast our kids can learn, thinking they we can control acquisition by counting reps and by picking the right structures and presenting them at the right time.
It’s really getting weird, all these teachers running around having discovered Krashen trying to get as many reps as possible when they a) don’t have nearly enough time to do the job and b) usually speak about the language in the L1 far more than they should in class, c) don’t really hear what Krashen is saying about how it’s all a big unconscious process anyway.
And there is a fourth factor at play here that shows how whack all of this stuff that we are doing is: d) most of our kids don’t really want to learn the language. They are put in the class because they need the credit. That is the killer. It is the true achilles heel of our profession, and of all teachers not just language teachers – we collect data on kids who aren’t motivated. That is like collecting data on running backs in the NFL, but running backs who are forced to be running backs in the NFL.
Those athletes, the ones forced to run as fast as they can into a wall of 320 pound men who want to hurt them repeatedly, which they say is like being in a car accident every weekend, are motivated to do so and are fit to do so. They are well compensated and they probably even like knocking the little people behind the big people over like bowling balls if they can get through the big people to do so. And they get to be on T.V.
Motivation – don’t leave home without it. But most of our students leave home and come to our classes still bewildered by life and not a little freaked out that the adults in their lives are telling them that it is best that they just sit down in a restraining device for eight hours a day and watch an adult speak or, worse, learn something from an electronic device. There goes their motivation – right into the toilet the moment they walk into the school building. (This may explain the frequent trips to the bathrooms during class.)
So our kids don’t have enough motivation, nor do they have available to them the thousands of hours of exposure to the language input for them to actually learn the language, and so they are doubly prevented from actually acquiring the language. And yet we go on trying to motivate them (we think that some day we will find the right activity, maybe on this blog) and also trying to fit enough reps in when the kids clearly need far more reps than we can possibly fit in within the time frame we have available. Whether it’s 2000 or 4000 or 16000 or 28000 reps, who cares? We don’t have the time we need.
Call this second article on reps a reality check, an attempt to see clearly what is actually going on with us as we walk around saying that we teach languages. I’m just trying to state the reality of what we do. Shouldn’t we reflect on what we are doing and whether it is possible or not? One benefit of doing that would be that we could cut ourselves some slack for not being perfect teachers with the best recorded gains in the district. That’s a good thing, as many of us often forget that we are not the best teachers in the world and that we cannot perform miracles in a broken system, which can be very detrimental to our lives.
It’s very hard to think clearly in the current professional setting we must endure, where people for whom we work who don’t know how languages are acquired and are imposing on us a proven-to-fail system that we must work within, one that leads to extremely limited gains by our students relative to our efforts, due to the factors presented above.