Here’s the thing: we have this computer in our minds, far greater, infinitely greater, than the most sophisticated computers ever built, and we go around thinking that we as teachers can impact the language output process of our students in a conscious way – that we can “teach them how to speak”. That doesn’t make sense to me.
I mean, the neuro-processing is so complex! When we interfere with it, the kids listen to us, some from the throne of their teenage fogs, hearing, too often, English (L1.5) from most of us, including most TPRS teachers (sic) instead of grokking the pure language (L2), and their computer can’t process because what we are giving them is garbage.
I am reminded of the old adage in the computer industry – “garbage in, garbage out”. If we put garbage (L1.5) in, we will get from our students, duh, garbage out.
Only when high quality,uninterrupted, compelling (Krashen) pure sound information is fed into the computer, can the work of computing be done successfully – not in a quick few lessons like in the movie Avatar. Only over long periods, actually years, can we start speaking naturally. As long as we don’t mess with it.
Again. the process is so complex that any conscious fooling around with it, like standing up in front of students and “teaching” them how to speak (c’mon!) is just futile. Conscious fooling with a miracle is just stupid. Encourage them, yes, when they feel like outputting in class – a few of my kids have almost zero level affective filters, but “teach” them? I hardly think it’s possible.
Let’s give up our hubristic assumptions that we as teachers can teach them how to speak, and let’s allow our students’ natural language learning capacity, this monster computer that we all have, to do its own thing without all that L1.5 conscious forcing nonsense. We can’t learn a language consciously (Krashen).
What Diana and Dr. Krashen and others mentioned here about the need the hero of Avatar to hear the Na’vi language without being forced to output it (that scene was too short), we all probably had similar reactions. It was a bit weird.
I wish that Dr. Krashen had told his friend Dr. Frommer to put something into the movie, some innocuous line of dialogue, that would get people to maybe reflect a little, even on an unconscious level, about what Dr. Krashen is saying.
Maybe they can do that in Avatar 2. I say that because it looks like this movie is going to reach more people than any movie in history. So, why not slip in a little Krashen? (for those who didn’t read Dr. Krashen’s comment here, it is his friend, Dr. Frommer at USC, who developed for the movie, over four years, the Na’vi language).
By the way, having seen the movie once, I am going back to study Na’vi today on a 3D Imax with my boys. I want to see if I can decode any patterns. The language was very compact – Dr. Frommer did a magnificent job, just beautiful, and the interpretation of the actors was just fantastic.
The language helped the movie so much – it uplifted everything about the movie. It sounded like Dr. Frommer based Na’vi on a beautiful mixture of Native American gutterances (made that word up) and African American rhythms, with a Creole element, not to mention some definite traces of Sanscrit, especially in the song of lament under the ancestral tree. And, of course, Krishna’s blue skin was there. It is worth studying. Maybe we can get Dr. Krashen to convince Dr. Frommer to learn TPRS well enough to teach the language to us. I’d love to speak a little Na’vi. Maybe get my own Avatar. Maybe we can all have our own Avatars for the Maine conference. How cool would that be? We could “see” each other, instead of the usual shit.
Back to the point:
Early forced output, usually mixed in with a little sneaked-in English – bad. The computer can’t handle it.
Thousands of hours of interesting, meaningful, personalized, unconsciously received (there’s what many people don’t get about TPRS), compelling, comprehensible input delivered with strong classroom rules and the “power” TPRS skills of Circling, Point and Pause, and SLOW – good. Computer is happy.