How Do We Learn To Speak Another Language?

Stephen Krashen has been studying the question for almost his entire career.  His research gave birth to "The Natural Approach", which seems to be the starting point for a multitude of modern communicative methods that encourage the student to "just get on with it" and seem to assume that the most essential quality needed by a language student is willingness to speak.

Of course that is an exaggeration and a caricature of many interesting and progressive methods. Just as Krashen's ideas are frequently reduced to a caricature.  I heard one esteemed speaker call some of Krashen's proponents "the-talk-until-you-drop-school."

Those who advocate the "Natural Approach" assume that if a student hears enough language, he will be able to speak.  But many seem to have forgotten or chosen to ignore what Krashen said about "comprehensible input".  The teacher may very well speak in the target language 100% of the time, but if the students do not understand him, they are not receiving comprehensible input.  A more careful reading of Krashen suggests that language is acquired through an interactive negotiation of meaning.  The student has an important role to play, not by forcing himself to speak, but by signalling whenever he does not understand. Then the teacher must do whatever is necessary to make what she said comprehensible.  I don't have the reference at hand, but I read many years ago about a study that showed that while students forget most of what they are told by the teacher, they almost always remember the answers to their own questions. So I like to wait for students to ask questions, knowing that there's a good chance they'll retain my answer.

In an ever recurring debate on the moretprs forum about how much grammar explanation students need, someone suggested that there is a middle ground between all tprs and all grammar and vocabulary lists. I replied that there was once a debate about whether or not the world was flat and that there could be no middle ground about it.  If we believe that language is acquired through comprehensible input, we have to admit that grammar explanations in the native language are a waste of time and memorizing vocabulary lists in the short term memory are a waste of effort.  The words just aren't where we need them when we need them. 

Another teacher replied that adult learners can become very stressed when they are not given the grammatical explanations they crave, and that he thought there could be a balance between the two methods.  He also thought that teaching the grammar can help reduce the number of repetitions needed before a structure can be acquired.  This is my reply:

I'm afraid that when people say "middle ground" or "balance", they mean 50/50. I also have adult learners and mine are French, which means they went through the traditional learning process before it was called traditional because it was considered the only way to teach.  Occasionally I give them the grammar they request in order to lower their affective filter.  I'm able to do this in pop-ups and whenever they ask a direct question, I answer it. (Actually, I'm a reformed 4%er who used to pride herself on her "clear explanations" and loved linguistics, so I have to put on my grammar brake before their faces go green.)  I insist on meaning more than grammatical labels.  Very rarely, when I feel a certain level of frustration, I set aside an entire hour and I tell them, this is the only grammar lesson you are getting this year, so pay attention. And I draw a mandala with them as a graphic representation of the English verb system.  They carefully note everything and label all the parts and some of them actually keep it and refer to it from time to time, but my real aim is to convince them that the English verb system is completely different from the French, that there is no future, conditional or subjunctive as such, just different ways of expressing the same ideas.  So they will stop laboriously trying to find correspondences that don't exist.

I've noticed that after a while my adult students stop asking questions and start to relax and their expression improves.  I've also noticed that it's very much a question of personalities. In one of my groups there's a couple that traveled around the world and lived in the States for a while, but never studied English in school.  Obviously their English is acquired. Another woman studied German as her first foreign language, was a good student and could read an English text with a dictionary.  Another woman is dyslexic, failed English in school but many years later had an exchange student live with her for a short while and discovered that she was the only person in the family that could communicate with her.  There was only one that insisted on grammatical explanations.  I'll let you guess which one.  I gave them the one hour grammar lesson a year ago and they have never asked for more. They are now functioning as a fairly homogenous group and I can point out what would be considered advanced structures and they click immediately.

Of course there is a place for the monitor and that is in editing written work.  We now have the very interesting possibility of putting a student's written text on a smartboard and editing it with the class, discussing what is acceptable, what is incomprehensible, etc.  TPRS doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath. It means everything in its place.  Just as we aim at 95% target language use in a class, but accept translations when they are the most efficient way to give meaning to a new word or expression, I think the "balance" between Comprehensible Input and grammatical explanations should be about the same.  In TPRS grammar is called pop-ups and should last only a few seconds.