Imagine a wire mesh on top of an empty container. We try to fill the container with words. But not all the words get through the mesh. We can’t stuff them in through the mesh. It is a natural process. All we can do is keep speaking the language, and some of the words natural drop through the holes of the mesh into acquisition. Gradually the container fills up, and the new language system becomes complete, a very good imitation of the original.
But we can’t rush the process. It takes many years, and thousands of hours. By the end of four years of hearing the language 95% of the time in our high school classrooms, if we have done a good job of providing comprehensible input to our students for all four years, the bottom of the container may just be barely covered. Our students when they graduate will have a long way to go for fluency, but we will have done all we can.
We have to stop thinking that we have to fill the container, working literally beyond our capacity each day trying to think of more and more ways to reach our students in the language so that people will see what good teachers we are and approve of us. We can only fill the bottom of the container in the time we have, and we can’t even fill it with the stuff we want, because it is the turbines of the deeper mind, when given comprehensible input in large quantities, that arrange the words that get through the mesh anyway.
We don’t create the language system – the deeper mind of the student does when it is able to hear the language spoken in interesting and meaningful ways over years. We throw words over the mesh and can’t know which words drop into the container.
So many teachers have made lists of words to target because they think that they can stuff the language through the mesh into the container by force. But the mesh will only let in the words that fit through, so it is folly to keep targeting lists of common verbs and plan everything out. It all happens naturally when comprehensible input is used. The words and structures will fly over the mesh and some, but not all, of the words will fall through the mesh and be turbined into the growing language system of the student in a natural way that we cannot predict.