Krashen

We have talked a lot about Krashen, especially in our small group of FL teachers. When discussing it as a whole class there are a lot of negative feelings on the subject. I think that a major reason for our disagreement deals with what subject we are teaching, FL or ESL. The goals in each are totally different. In ESL you are trying to assimilate the students into a culture as quickly as possible. In FL you are working a lot slower. You are building on language from the beginning, they will never be asked to test on something they don't know in the language. ESL students are tested on English they may or may not know every single day. There are some really valid points in the Krashen hypothesis when viewed from the FL perspective. There are also really valid arguments against it from the ESL perspective. Sometimes we treat ESL and FL like they are entirely the same thing, this is one instance where we really see the differences between the two.

Critical Period Hypothesis

I've read a lot and heard a lot about CPH. I'm certainly not an expert by any means. I do have a few theories on the reasons why things happen. I think that children definitely have an easier time learning the language, however, I don't believe that it is impossible for an adult learner to speak another language with a proper accent. I've seen people that have no problem distinguishing sounds and producing them. I think there is maybe something involving our individual intelligences that plays a role. Some people cannot produce the right sounds at all, for others it seems easier. I think that children are used to listening for noise differences and they spend most of their time mimicing what other people are saying. When we get older, i believe that we stop listening to whole words all together. We start to fill in and only listen to partial speech. I think this could be a reason why we can't differentiate between the sounds of our first language and those of a second. Another reason why adults have trouble producing other sounds is because our muscles are used to using the sounds of our first language, the ones required for a second language often are not used in the same way and need to be "worked-out" before you are able to produce those sounds naturally. Children, especially babies, use all of the muscles in their mouths when making the random sounds that seem "foreign" to the adults around them. These are just some of the observations I've had when studying and discussing this topic in the past.