I don’t think we have it right when we claim that the kids have acquired something. How do we know? Stories are so powerful and can convey so much so fast in ways that we don’t fully understand that when the kids are following a story line, fully focused only on meaning, we cannot say one way or the other if the sound chunks that we are using have been acquired. All we can say is that they are understanding the message.
It is really very cavalier of us to assume acquisition of certain target vocabulary and to try to measure and label that process. We may use a chunk of sound repeatedly, for example “went”, and then we say, “Oh, they have acquired that!” and so we put “went” into some kind of acquired list and plan the next stories and add in three new structures and then, slowly, we assume that their vocabulary is built that way.
But that naively conflicts with the Net Hypothesis as I understand it. I think that the net is much bigger and amorphous than the net we build in our calculated ways to introduce new vocabulary. Making assumptions with something as amorphous as the unconscious mind in terms of what has and has not been acquired seems to be an iffy proposition.
I don’t think we can measure any of the process of acquisition, is what I’m saying. We can’t really know what our students know and don’t know any more than we can measure each other’s vocabulary in L1. I’ve heard teachers say things like, “Oh, that hasn’t been acquired yet!” or “Oh, that was acquired by them last year.” when in reality we can’t know.
The net is much too big to know anything about what has been caught in it. It is a galaxy. Certain words probably routinely slip in and out of the net before they are actually part of the person’s new language system. If that is true, then all our calculations about what has been and hasn’t been acquired are not accurate, and that the thing we call acquisition is a much more fluid, moving, changing thing that we think.
Of course, this idea has implications in how I apply the comprehensible input approach in my classroom in the future. Just yesterday, when I was doing Cheap Jewelry* after not doing stories for awhile (I have been messing with the reading novels thing for the past few months), I realized that “went” was not fully solid with my kids.
The few months’ hiatus from stories and from the sound of “went” caused about half of my kids to be a bit unsure when I said it. It wasn’t, therefore, really acquired.
*I have to say that when doing that story yesterday I saw in the most clear fashion, more than ever before in a story, a group of kids, 10th pd. on a Friday at the end of the year yet, totally unaware of the individual words with eyes focused so much on the message that it was like a movie in their minds. To see that in such a clear way makes me believe even more in the power of stories, and, especially, Matava stories.
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/04/23/not-enough-reps/ https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/08/12/dr-krashen/