Resumen de didactica

The miracle of language

All children acquire language as they develop. Indeed many children around the world acquire
more than one language and by the age of six or seven are speaking as confident bi or
trilingual. Children are not taught language, they acquire it subconsciously as a result of the
massive exposure to it which they get from adults and other children around them. Their
instinct acts upon the language they hear and transforms it into a knowledge of the language
and an ability to speak it.

For example if we consider the language exposure that children receive we find that it is a
special kind of language. People don’t speak to two and three years old the way they speak to
adults. Instead they use exaggerated intonation with higher pitch than is customary this
conveys special interest and empathy they simplify what they say, too, using shorter sentences
and fewer subordinate clauses. They choose special vocabulary which the children can
understand, rather than more sophisticated lexical items.

So in sense children are being taught rules of discourse even though neither they nor their
parents are conscious of this. It is usually done subconsciously, so if you asked most people
exactly how they speak to children they would not be able to say on what basis they choose
words or grammar.

Finally children have a powerful incentive to communicate effectively. Even at pre-word phase
of their development they have an instinct to let people know when they are happy;
miserable, hungry or alarmed. The more language they can understand the better they can
function.

Acquisition and learning

Harold Palmer was interested in the difference between ‘spontaneous’ and ‘studied’
capabilities. The former described the ability to acquire language naturally and subconsciously
whereas the latter allowed students to organise their language and apply their conscious
knowledge to the task in hand.

Krashen put forward what he called the input hypothesis. He claimed that language which we
acquire subconsciously is language we can easily use in spontaneous conversation because it is
instantly available when we need it. Language that is learnt’ on the other hand, where ‘learnt’
means taught and studied as grammar and vocabulary is not available for spontaneous use in
this way. Indeed it may be that only use for learnt language is to help us to monitor our
spontaneous communication; but then the more we monitor what we are saying, the less
spontaneous we become. In Krashen’s view, therefore, acquired language and learnt language
are different both in character and effect.

Krashen saw the successful acquisition by students of a second language as being bound up
with the nature of the language input they received. It had to be comprehensible input I+1
(that is, information the students already have plus the next level up) and the students had to
be exposed to it in a relaxed setting. This input is roughly tuned (rather as a parent-child
language is subconsciously moderated as we saw above) and is in stark contrast to the finely-
tuned input of much language instruction, where specific graded language has been chosen for
conscious learning.

The contributions of behaviourism

The direct method emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In here, the teacher used
only English in the classroom; form and meaning associations were made using real objects
pictures or demonstrations. The direct method really got going when it was married to the
theory of behaviourism. In behaviourist theory conditioning is the result of a three stage
procedure: stimulus response and reinforcement.

In a book called ‘verbal behaviour’ the psychologist Bernard Skinner suggested that much the
same process happens in language learning, especially first language learning. The baby needs
food (the incentive) so it cries and food is produced. Later the infant swaps crying for one or
two words utterances to produce the same effect, and because words are more precise than
cries, it gradually learns to refine the words to get exactly what is wanted.

In language learning, a behaviourist slant is evident when students are asked to repeat
sentences correctly and are rewarded for such correctness by teacher prise or some other
benefit. The more often this occurs, the more the learner is conditioned to produce the
language successfully on all future occasions. Behaviourism was directly responsible for
audiolingualism, with its heavy emphasis on drilling. As such the influence of behaviourism was
the direct opposite of any theory of subconscious acquisition.

Language will take care of ‘itself’

In his book ‘Deshooling society’ the educational theorist Ivan Iillich questioned the whole
purpose of formal education.

“In fact learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning
is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a
meaningful setting.

Dick Allwright and his colleagues started to question the ways they had been teaching. For
example, they had asked students to study grammar; they had explained vocabulary and
taught paragraph organisation. But it didn’t seem to be working and it did not ‘feel right’.

“If the language teacher’s management activities are directed exclusively at involving the
leaners in solving communication problems in the target language, then language learning will
take care of itself”

In the course which followed, students were given tasks to do outside the classroom which
involved them in speaking and reading; real tasks for which the teachers gave no language
training, advice or, crucially correction. Students also took part in communication games. A
student had to draw the same picture as their partner without looking at the partner’s picture,
for example or they had to arrange objects in the same order as their partner without looking
at their partner’s objects, both tasks relying on verbal communication alone. The results
although not scientifically assessed were apparently favourable.

Allwright and his colleagues