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The Primacy of Extensive Reading and Listening, Putting Theory into Practice
This chapter first discusses key features of various language teaching approaches, which tend to give more emphasis on the explicit teaching of language knowledge. The target language is often broken down into small units to be presented in a piecemeal fashion. While this way of teaching language is not without value and can help develop students’ explicit language knowledge, we argue that teachers should also help students acquire and extend students’ implicit linguistic knowledge. This is because research evidence shows that our ability to use language for communication draws heavily on our implicit linguistic knowledge, not so much on explicit language knowledge. Years of second language research show that implicit knowledge is mostly acquired via the provision of meaningful language input, not through explicit teaching of language or through deliberate output-based practice. In the second part of the chapter, we offer practical ideas on how input-based practice can be incorporated in the teaching of skills courses such as speaking, listening, reading and writing so that students can experience much greater and richer input in the classroom.
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