Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky said, back in the 1960s: “Grammar [is] acquired by virtually everyone, effortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner, merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure, and care.”
Look at the words that Chomsky used there: community, care, effortless exposure, interaction. Such words evoke what Lev Vygotsky was researching as early as the 1920s – that acquiring a language is a reciprocal and participatory human process in which, just by interacting with one another, the language is acquired. No thinking is involved!
Consider that word “minimal” in Chomsky’s statement. He said that people acquire grammar – which I define as “correctly spoken speech” – merely by “living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction”.
It’s true. The person learning the language need make no effort. Don’t small children acquire their first language merely by being in community with minimal effort? They certainly don’t sit there and try to acquire the language every day. They just acquire it!
Our students don’t need to do worksheets. They don’t need a textbook. They DO need to be in a sharing community in their language classrooms.
So, per Chomsky, if I am in a community in which language is being spoken in order to communicate, I will learn the grammar. That gives us a new definition of grammar, one that we could define as “correctly spoken speech.” I may not know the technical difference between the various kinds of pronouns, but I will know how to use pronouns correctly in speech as a result of my being a member of a community and so I will know the grammar.
So, our first lesson in language acquisition is that it is processed quite effectively by the unconscious mind when we hear it and read it enough and that the conscious mind cannot do that work. That is a big pill to swallow indeed, for those of us trained in the old ways.
The road for language teachers into the future goes in two directions. In this book we’re taking the new fork that goes in the direction of learning languages by focusing on the message and not the old fork that goes in the direction of focusing on form.