When you assess a kid on whether he knows certain discrete facts about the language, you kill his interest in it.
The tragedy is that his mind already possesses wiring (that we often do not acknowledge) that is easily capable of acquiring the language, if only it were left to its own ways of decoding, which need but hear the language in massive amounts of comprehensible input.
Think if you tested a small child using the itemized testing method. You would give him the impression that he’s not good at it, because, even if he could decode much of what he heard, he wouldn’ t know how to spell certain things and all of that that is currently done. He couldn’t possibly answer questions like verb form spellings.
Rather, flood students’ (of any age) minds with language – lots and lots of it. This is where Krashen comes in. The unconscious mind is wonderfully set up to select exactly what it wants to learn among the din that it constantly hears over long periods of time.
This complex unconscious process is not apparent in classrooms, however, and so many teachers have adopted a “show me what you know” attitude towards assessing, especially in the early levels, when the students in point of fact aren’t yet ready to do that.
If said teachers, so eager to see results from their efforts to “teach”, could only be patient and let the input do its unseen work for the first few years, the gains would be astounding. The mind would work à l’abri de sa chambre inconsciente and, when the flowers bloomed, it would be some garden!
The unconscious mind is so wonderfully set up to select exactly what it needs when it needs it, that even stupid people (in teachers’ eyes) can gain fluency, if Malcom Gladwell is to be believed, in merely 10,000 hours.