(teach) Re: Bedtime stories for teachers: The Adventures of Francois Gouin

> Of course, we can't take our students to America. So the natural conclusion of what Jim is referring to is the effectiveness of extensive reading or extensive exposure to English through recordings, movies, etc. at a level of comprehensible input. It works. In this way, every English student in the world learns things that were never taught.
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> Dave Kees
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As Karen says, adult and child brains would appear to learn language in different ways. In any case, young children learn most of their language through interaction for the first five years of their life and do not start reading until they have a vocabulary of around 5000 words. This is when extensive reading kicks in as a learning aid but most L2 learners never get this far. If they have more than 5K words they are most likely in tertiary studies and are swamped by intensive reading.

If we want to look at "the natural way", most third world children learn their L1 through interaction with limited access to movies and reading, and learn an L2 in much the same way when they are a little older.

We can get some tips from L1 acquisition but in fact both early L1 learning and school L1 learning are different from L2 acquisition and we are specialists and must go our own way.

Dick Tibbetts