I am always beating the drum about unconscious acquisition. It is the gorilla in the room that few, even those who have been studying Krashen for years, don’t seem to want to own. For them the world might indeed be round, but maybe it’s flat too.
Bob sent more ammo for the point that if the instruction involves focusing on the words and not the meaning, then it is not going to work:
Guys, see this quotation from recent study. This is brain evidence of our unconscious acquisition, no?
Bob
The brain processes syntactic information implicitly, in the absence of awareness, the authors concluded. “While other aspects of language, such as semantics and phonology, can also be processed implicitly, the present data represent the first direct evidence that implicit mechanisms also play a role in the processing of syntax, the core computational component of language.”
It may be time to reconsider some teaching strategies, especially how adults are taught a second language, said Neville, a member of the UO’s Institute of Neuroscience and director of the UO’s Brain Development Lab.
Children, she noted, often pick up grammar rules implicitly through routine daily interactions with parents or peers, simply hearing and processing new words and their usage before any formal instruction. She likened such learning to “Jabberwocky,” the nonsense poem introduced by writer Lewis Carroll in 1871 in “Through the Looking Glass,” where Alice discovers a book in an unrecognizable language that turns out to be written inversely and readable in a mirror.
For a second language, she said, “Teach grammatical rules implicitly, without any semantics at all, like with jabberwocky. Get them to listen to jabberwocky, like a child does.”
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health supported the research (grant 5R01DC000128).
Here’s the link to the full article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130513131512.htm
I am also collecting such material for my paper for the APA next January.