Transcript
1 turns · 18 min[upbeat music] Teaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Bosche, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. [upbeat music] Hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. So glad you're here again this week. Last week we talked about the five stages of language acquisition, and I hope that episode gave you a completely new way of seeing the students in your classroom. It really is a confidence builder when you feel good about knowing the different language acquisition stages, and you can start to identify just by observation where your students are at. Because when you can look at a student who is silent and say with confidence, "Oh, okay, this is stage one. This is ... They're just beginners. This is normal. This is exactly what they need," that really does change everything about how you show up for them. Now today we are going one level deeper into the who, because understanding the stages tells you where your students are, but understanding how language is actually acquired, the conditions that make it happen, and the conditions that shut it down tells you why they are there and what you can do to move them forward. So this episode is built around one of the most influential bodies of research in language education, and that's the work of Stephen Krashen. And by the end of this episode, you are going to understand your classroom environment in a completely new way. Let's get into it. So here's something I want you to think about. You have probably had students who seem to me making progress and then suddenly stalled. Maybe a student who was starting to talk, started to engage, and then it felt like something just totally changed. They all of a sudden went quiet. They stopped taking risks. Maybe they started shutting down in class, and you wondered, "What happened? Did I do something wrong? Did something change at home?" Maybe. But it is also possible that the answer is something that's called the affective filter, and once you understand what that is, you will start to see it everywhere in your classroom. But before we get there, I wanna start with something even more foundational, the difference between acquisition and learning. Now, Stephen Krashen, who's a linguist and researcher who has shaped language education more than perhaps anyone else in the last 50 years, drew a critical distinction between two different processes, language acquisition and language learning. Now think for a second. Can you identify the difference of those two? Well, language learning is conscious. It is explicit. It is what happens when a student memorizes a grammar rule, studies a vocabulary list, or practices conjugating verbs. That was my experience learning Spanish. I could conjugate those verbs with no
Episode notes
In Episode 206 of the Equipping ELLs podcast, Beth Vaucher goes one level deeper into the WHO of the ELL Success Cycle — moving from knowing where students are (the five stages from last week) to understanding how language is actually acquired. This episode is built around one of the most influential bodies of research in language education: the work of Stephen Krashen. By the end of the episode, listeners will understand their classroom environment in a completely new way — not as a soft, feel-good addition to instruction, but as a direct lever on language acquisition itself.
Beth opens with a scenario every ELL teacher has experienced: a student who seemed to be making progress and then suddenly stalled. They went quiet, stopped taking risks, started shutting down. The answer, Beth explains, often lies in something called the affective filter — and understanding it changes how you read every student in your room.
Before getting to the affective filter, Beth lays the foundational distinction that Krashen identified between language acquisition and language learning. Language learning is conscious and explicit — memorizing grammar rules, studying vocabulary lists, conjugating verbs. Beth shares her own experience learning Spanish, where she could conjugate verbs perfectly on paper but completely fell apart in actual conversation. That gap between learned knowledge and