Questions for Textbook Companies – 4

2 thoughts on “Questions for Textbook Companies – 4”

1. Robert Harrell

   April 21, 2014 at 12:25 am

   I need to correct a reference above. I’ve recently been reading Daniel Pink’s Drive and accidentally included him in the list of language acquisition researchers. Pink writes about motivation. The cognition and psycholinguistic researcher is Steven Pinker.

   I apologize for the error.

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2. Chris Stolz

   April 21, 2014 at 11:41 am

   There’s a very good short paper on Gross’s site about order of acquisition. Basically, while it is broadly fixed, everyone picks things up at various speeds (I am referring to grammar– vocab you pick up whatever you hear the most) and “acquisition” is not a yes/no process: people who have acquired rules still make mistakes sometimes etc.

   For this reason alone, texts are stupid: the book can hammer away till the cows come home at plural adjective agreement (or whatever) but if people aren’t ready for it, they simply cannot acquire it. The classic example: my Mexican tenant who STILL cannot say “he likes running”– he says “he like running”– cos that 3rd person -s is late-acquired. He can say “I would have enjoyed running with you” (more “complex” grammar).

   This is why Krashen says students need “input of maximum richness.” Because the teacher cannot– ever– know when students are “ready” for grammar item _____, the input should be 100% comprehensible, interesting and repeatable, and should contain a nice dense mix of everything. Sure, the story or unit can focus on something, but you have zero guarantees kids will pick up on the grammar item of your choice. They will probably pick up the nouns verbs etc (maybe only in recognition mode) because people pick up “meaning stuff” before grammar. (Hence pidgins sounding like “man go car”). But grammar? Good luck.

   I would tell your Defartment Head that Realidades does not provide compelling input, that it does not provide input of maximum richness, that it makes flat-out wrong assumptions about order of acquisition (e.g. that present tense is acquired before subjunctive– demonstrably false), and that asper actfl guidelines it makes it very difficult to provide 90% TL input cos who wants to spend 2 weeks discussing one subject in 1 verb tense?

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