Thoughts on thoughts on teaching :) #4

As part of a professional development class on language teaching every week I have to reflect on one common idea or belief about the language acquisition process. Here are some of the discussion prompts and my personal take on them:

"LANGUAGE LEARNERS SHOULD BE EXPOSED ONLY TO THE FORMS THEY ARE TAUGHT"

COMPREHENSIBLE VS RESTRICTED INPUT

Each part of this statement can, and should, be analyzed and challenged separately:

• the statement implies that students will only be exposed to input inside the walls of the classroom, where, in theory, we can control the kind of input the learners are exposed to. We know however that the most efficient way of learning a language takes advantage of the language ecosystem outside of the classroom where such control is unattainable, even if it were productive and advisable.
• even if we only apply it to the time our students spend in the classroom, this statement remains certainly problematic. In fact, Krashen states that to obtain optimal input we don’t need to limit the input to only i+1, what we must do instead is to expose the students to enough input (so that i+1 will be present) and make sure that the input is understandable through linguistic and nonlinguistic aids.
• saying that the learners should be exposed only to the forms they are taught puts an unmistakable emphasis on the FORMS, which reflects a way of building curriculums that uses the structures as a starting point, assuming that we learn the structure then we practice and thus obtain fluency. The input interpretation however affirms quite the opposite “we acquire by "going for meaning" first, and as a result, we acquire structure!” (Krashen, 2015). 

In conclusion, while there certainly is a time during a lesson in which it is appropriate to tailor the input so that it will be easier for the students to identify and discover “+1” independently (especially if we want to use an inductive teaching style), in general trying to expose students to “+1” exclusively would result in an unnatural, artificial language that doesn’t reflect the real language spoken outside our classroom’s door; so to once again use Krashen’s words: “If we focus on comprehension and communication, we will meet the syntactic requirements for optimal input.”