So after reading Annie's paper, last night I had this delightful dream that I was back at the U of U to be honored for something (don't remember what, maybe I made a sizeable donation to the alumni club), and my two favorite linguistics professors attended (though because they were there, none of the rest of the department was.) And I was talking to them a little bit about how the young linguists today deconstruct Chomsky. I wasn't able to say it quite like that, because it was a dream and none of my words really worked, but I was able to think about it when I woke up.
As I explained to Annie in my comments on the paper, it's totally backwards to associate Chomsky with the Grammar Translation methods. They were what preceded him in linguistic understanding. Chomsky's assertion of the Language Acquisition Device was actually the cause of immersion language learning, that we have innate capacities to absorb language if we are only exposed to it. Of course, it hasn't been shown to really work out ideally, especially with people older than 2.
And since Chomsky didn't turn out to be completely right, it probably galls anyone else who's ever gone for a Ph.D. in Linguistics that he is so prominent in the history of 20th century linguistics. And Chomsky has done a lot of damage to his reputation with his own celebrity. But I was taught by people who were young when he was actually still producing, and in my dream I could remember how exciting it used to be.
I also understand now how children learn or don't learn a thing like swimming. They have to keep moving through phases of challenge, trust, and competence to overcome thresholds of panic in multiple skills. I don't know if it really is like language in the end. I do know you will never teach a child something they do not have a desire to learn, and that is why we send them to school, so they can learn the stuff parents lack the resources to spark a desire for. So I don't know if it's possible to model educational language acquisition on infant language acquisition.
The thing I think is interesting, when we look at a process like creolization which was Chomsky's most persuasive evidence for the LAD, was how the grammatical holes in pidgins were filled in a way that was eventually consistent throughout the community. I think it is because a language does not exist solely in the mind of one child, but in usage in a community of speakers. But there we get into the kind of theoretical nonsense that was being abandoned when I was looking at whether to go to grad school.
Perhaps the value of CLT (which I can't remember what it means, but it's something post immersion that Annie was writing about) should be to provide the community of speakers for the speaker to develop in. In this instance, a large class size could be a benefit and not a liability. We do not just acquire the language, it acquires us or some nonsense like that.
