4. Anxiety is the student’s arch enemy
This brings me to one of Krashen’s most famous insights, namely the “affective filter”. This means that the rate of acquisition decreases if we are under stress, or if we experience anxiety. Luckily, most children have a virtually stress-free language-learning environment at home with their mothers and fathers. But for learners of a second language, the classroom can be a cause of anxiety, greatly affecting the way they receive and process comprehensible input.
By contrast, a house party with lots of international guests is a great place to practise languages, as everybody is relaxed and having a good time. Such an environment offers the language learner plenty of comprehensible input, but (hopefully) none of the anxiety. The lesson here for teachers is that they can create a similar environment by turning the classroom into a sort of house party where people feel comfortable and relaxed.
5. The monitor hypothesis
According to Krashen, conscious language-learning cannot be the source of spontaneous speech, it can only monitor output, i.e., production in speech or writing. In other words, when learners freely formulate an utterance in the target language, they can only draw upon their repertoire of acquired language to check whether it is grammatically correct. This reduces errors as the learner can apply consciously learned rules to an utterance before producing it, or after production through self-correction. As many people place a high value on accuracy, especially in formal situations, the existence of the 'monitor' could be seen as a reason for retaining a grammar focus in a given lesson.
One way to apply this in the classroom would be to have learners notice grammatical features in listening and reading texts using a guided discovery approach. For example, if the learners were given a listening task to do on the biography of a famous person who is still alive, the teacher could hand out the transcript and get the students to underline all of the examples of the present perfect tense. This might be followed by a short discussion, led by the teacher, as to why the tense is being used in this particular situation, followed by some concept-checking questions to ensure students understand how to use the target language. However, Krashen is clear that the main focus of classroom activity should be on giving learners as much comprehensible input as possible. Teachers should base their lessons on meaningful interactions with plenty of graded listening and reading input.
To be continued...