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,
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.
The Din Soup
To continue the image, it is when the chef makes the soup that bubbles form as it heats up and forms into tasty language. Our students’ unconscious minds enjoy the soup and they gobble up all of its nutrients and then in sleep the language flows into the deeper mind for processing, and the language is acquired. The students don’t have to worry about how the soup is made – they just enjoy it. That’s what the research tells us about how fluency is attained.
The process happens in the way that dreams happen. Wisps and bits of sounds that we heard earlier that day in class are “played back” in our active waking state and in our sleep, where the process of language acquisition really gets cranked up while we go about our daily business, not thinking about the language at all, just hearing more and more of it.
Words and word chunks, the little and big pieces of the comprehensible language soup that we have heard in context are sometimes noticed by us during the day. Stephen Krashen calls that the “Din”, the bubbling up into our conscious minds during the day of language that we have heard earlier.
The unconscious mind in the basement “kitchen” makes organizational and flavoring and presentational decisions that are exponentially more complex and beautiful than our conscious minds can ever make with regard to creation of the language soup. The chef is a genius and he prepares his meals without regard for a person’s IQ. He gives with both hands to all, even if they aren’t hungry.
Very little of the comprehensible input that we have heard even makes it into our conscious awareness, but enough of it does to create the Din. It’s like we are getting parts of a song from down the street but before the wind takes it – we get to hear a bit of it and it makes us want to hear more.
So, the Din is what happens when the chef has received enough food supplies (comprehensible input) to make the Din Soup. We don’t analyze how we digest our food either, and so it is with language acquisition – no conscious analysis is necessary. In fact, it ruins everything.
But if we allow lots of English (conscious language analysis) into our classrooms it prevents the Din Soup from being made into language because the deeper mind is not equipped to handle a mix of English and the target language. Rather, it needs pure unfettered language – the chef has no idea of what to do with grammar rules.
The din is a constant bubbling of sound. It’s a flood of words sent into the kitchen that Chomsky has called quite accurately the Language Acquisition Device. Let the chef – the one with the tallest hat – take over. That’s not us.
We aren’t chefs. We drive the delivery trucks and all we can do is just provide the ingredients of language to our students’ unconscious minds so that they don’t starve.