The Chef
Everything rests upon the main research idea that language acquisition is an unconscious process. Here’s an image to drive the point home: The unconscious mind is like a chef whose kitchen is located in the basement of our students’ unconscious minds.
The vegetables and broth and other ingredients are the comprehensible input that we provide the chef. We deliver the ingredients to him in class by speaking the language to our students. The chef, the unconscious mind, is the master organizer of the meal.
We can’t go into the basement kitchen. We can only drive the truck that delivers the food. We have no access to the recipes the chef uses. The chef has his own recipes stored in his unconscious mind – he never uses a cookbook – and he takes the ingredients and prepares the meal (fluency) in his own kitchen (the safety and security of the unconscious minds of our students). But he can’t make the meal without the ingredients.
We can’t even go into the chef’s kitchen to prep the vegetables. We just bring the food to the door of the kitchen and drop it off. We provide our students with understandable messages that they want to hear and that’s it.
Then why are we having so many meetings and filling out so many forms and targeting so many
structures and writing and buying so many materials and rewriting so many pacing guides and still worrying about all that grammar and all that stuff of the conscious mind that focuses on form? That approach may work in math and science, but it doesn’t work in language instruction.
We make a daily delivery of comprehensible input vegetables, still in wooden crates, and then another class comes into our classroom five minutes later and we make another delivery, and for most of us this happens five times a day.
It is a fairly simple job. But then we make it complicated by taking the vegetables (the language) and delivering them to the attic where the conscious analytical mind reigns supreme and, forgetting that we have a chef who can do all the work, we try to do it ourselves via analysis of the parts of the language. Why would we do that?
We plan the menu and cut and slice and dice and overcook the food/language and in doing so we end up serving boring meals like worksheets with side dishes of lots of English in our classrooms. We can’t do that anymore.
Doing all that work is so much more than we have to do! Teachers seem to love to make more work for themselves than is necessary. And with it comes huge amounts of unnecessary stress.
We impede the natural and effortless unconscious process of language creation simply because we try to make the food in the attic without the help of the chef, without the help of the unconscious mind. The chef can bring no results if he is not given food (comprehensible input) as we, up in the attic which is not built for preparing language meals, starve our kids of what they must have (comprehensible input) to acquire the language.
Many if not most of the kids dislike the attic-prepared food that we force on them during class when delivered to their conscious minds in unappetizing ways. They can’t digest that kind of instruction. They can’t think their way to knowing the language. Some students stay with us just enough to pass the course and get the credit. A few big eaters eat everything we serve them, memorizing all the grammar rules, but mainly just to get the A in the class,
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but they are not part of a community.
Those big eaters who get everything correct on the memorization tests ironically don’t even learn the language at all. The results of that kind of instruction are revealed when those students arrive in college after three or four years of study in high school and are routinely put back into a level 102 or even 101 class, whereupon they start the whole paralyzing process of analyzing the language all over again.