“We’ve been working on the Present Tense for over two months now. We’ve been doing drills, lots of repetitions, we’ve created real-life situations to make the language come to life and yet, they can produce little or nothing!”
“How can they not know this after doing this it for more than three weeks!”
My reply in most cases is the same: “Just give them more time.”
As times goes by, provided that our students are in a truly communicative setting, they will start to produce what they cannot do right now.
The widespread ignorance of this stage in the language acquisition process can create very unwanted situations. As a Colombian saying goes: “la ignorancia es atrevida.” Lacking an exact English idiom, or at least not knowing one myself, I will proceed to explain its meaning. The saying basically says that “ignorance is rude and causes us to do stupid things.”
On one occasion, while working in a pretty nice school in the US teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) to a child from Mexico, I got a call from my supervisor. She was extremely concerned as the principal of the school I was working at had called her to complain about my skills as a teacher as my student “had not been making any progress at all” since she started to receive my services. Even though this same principal had sat in on one of my classes and even written a report that said that my work was “above average,” she seriously doubted that my teaching approach really worked. After all, although the lesson had been fun and provided plenty of communicative opportunities for students to put the language to use, she had not seen any drills, repetitions, gap filling exercises, and grammar rules had never been presented to my group of “seven-year-olders.” So, in her opinion, it was only natural this student could not do or say much in English. The funny thing was… this student had been in the US for less than two months and had been receiving ESL services for less than a month and a half!!!
What is more, unlike the idea this principal had, she had made ENORMOUS progress. She could already understand most greetings and basic classroom directives; she could understand several types of questions on different everyday topics. She could even understand many things that people told her to do and basic facts! However, when it came to talking, she could just say one or two greetings and produce “yes” or “no” replies. Does this mean she had not made any progress? Does this mean she had not learned anything? Not in the least! On the contrary, she was way advanced in her initial stage of second language acquisition and very soon afterwards she entered the early production period. Plain and simple, she was going through her silent period.
