A few months ago Bob Patrick brought up the subject of four percenters here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/04/23/4ers/
Here is a follow up to that article by Bob:
It occurred to me today that I have found an answer to a question I asked several weeks ago: who are the fourpercenters? How do we describe them/know them?
They are the students who love learning ABOUT the language. There’s nothing wrong with that. Knowing about the language comes in handy, as Krashen says, when editing work. Fourpercenters also tend to like editing their work. Having said that, just because they love learning ABOUT the language does not mean that they can skip acquiring the language, and that process is the same for them as anyone else. It’s also why we run into colleagues who are so resistant. They never really acquired the language much, so they are terrified at the thought of what we are doing here. Even that’s okay–as long as they get busy acquiring the language they are supposed to be teaching. That may sound crazy to some of you, but there’s not a Latin teacher here who didn’t have to acquire the language AFTER learning all ABOUT it.
I responded:
What’s great about it is that any teacher brave enough to use CI and step out of that L1 based comfort zone can work towards acquisition in their own classrooms, sharing the process with the kids, especially in those shorter courses like in a 6-12 week exploratory class. They can keep it to PQA, and simple PQA at that, as I did when teaching Spanish without actually knowing it by relying almost entirely on a little over 100 words on the wall. I learned a lot of Spanish by teaching it.
Another thing, watch a film a night in the TL. I have noticed that the up and down with the eyes from scene to English subtitles really gets my deeper mind active when I sleep after watching a movie. Judy’s little book on how to use film to teach a language (o.k. little pamplet, whatever, we just want it here on the site in the fall, Judy) can be of use in this regard. It’s all about working the language, the more hours we get the more command we have, right?