A few weeks ago I was in Brussels visiting an old friend, Jonathan, who is retired but does voluntary work including teaching English to teenage students who have dropped out of school for various reasons. These students attend a school run by ABER . Their website states that their aim is to help 15-21 year-olds get back into school by offering a personal education programme. This includes English lessons. Most of the class were of Moroccan descent, all had fluent French. The class had various levels of English ranging from A! (very little) to A2/B1 - a certain degree of fluency. My friend asked me if I would like to come along and join in with an English lesson, which I was very happy to do. Now Jonathan is not a trained teacher and he was pleased to let me take over the class of about 12 students. We had been given a somewhat dated article to use whose main aim was to get students using the future tense. To play along, I got the students to do some choral reading, pronunciation ...
In this post I'm returning to a subject which is so important for language teachers, and one I have written about before in a historical context here . Implicit language learning refers to how we acquire a language naturally and unconsciously, without explicitly studying grammar rules, doing exercises or memorising vocabulary. Historically, different language has been used to distinguish between implicit and explicit learning. Researchers and educators have contrasted, for example: Informal vs formal learning Naturalistic vs classroom learning Acquisition vs learning (Krashen) Spontaneous vs studial (H.E. Palmer) Knowing how vs knowing that (declarative vs procedural knowledge) These terms broadly reflect a long-standing attempt to distinguish between language development that occurs through meaningful exposure and communication, and language knowledge that develops through structured instruction and conscious study. I'm going to throw a pebble in the water at this point by s...