If we listen and we can understand, he argues, we will eventually be able to speak. Īt the core of Krashen’s approach ever since has been the primacy of listening to “comprehensible input” over everything else. So after that time in the late 70’s, the pendulum swung from the very artificial teaching of grammar to a more “natural” approach (BTW, that was the title of the foundational book written by Tracy Terrell and Stephen Krashen in 1977: The Natural Approach (Language Teaching Methodology). Why were his hypotheses so attractive? Because they represented a 180° departure from the very artificial teaching that was taking place at that time (and unfortunately keeps taking place today): grammar-based language instruction. Krashen’s fresh ideas were adopted without much questioning by language educators in the US and even abroad – such was (and is) his influence to this date. Indeed, I had internalized those hypotheses to the point that they had become my norm with my students and with my own kids as well. As many other language educators, I had learned by heart – and loved –linguist Stephen Krashen’s 5 revolutionary hypotheses that changed the curse of language education forever (he proposed them in the late 70’s and early 80’s).
There was a time when I believed in the inevitability of the silent period as well. The “silent period” in second language acquisition refers to the period of time when the child or adult is first introduced to the second language and the time when he or she begins to speak. In fact, my skepticism has grown so much in one particular area that I can hardly contain myself when I hear it introduced to new teachers (or parents) as an inevitable (and natural) stage in second language acquisition: the “Silent Period.” During the years, I have become more and more suspicious of “natural approaches” to second language education.
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