After much enthousiasm about Krashen’s  skills-building versus comprehension hypothesis for learning an additional language, I had the following thought

Are we all the same faced with a second language?

 Krashen’s Mexican person who learnt Yiddish actually also learnt English at the same time, which somewhat implies he had a talent for learning languages.

In the same way that some people have a talent for maths and others a talent for music, well obviously some people have a talent for learning another language.

 And the problem is that the majority of EFL teachers, and especially NNESTs, have that talent (which does not mean that it is easy for them, we all know that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration)

AND while SK says that there’s just too much to learn when learning English as a foreign language

“Anyone who has studied linguistics knows that decades of intensive labor have been invested in coming up with an accurate description of English, the most described language”, KOTESOL 2011

 He does imply that it would be the same for any language whereas this seems to ignore the fact that the description of a language (its grammar) is very different depending on the language i.e. what about languages have conjugations, declinations, and other “rules” making their learning (to an educated level) very different to that of learning English. This takes me back to a previous post “Why native English speakers have more difficulty than most with learning a foreign language”

Basically, I was so thrilled with SKs Istanbul talk, because he provided the academic fuel to my ongoing fight with admin, working in a Physics dept, that English, although on the curriculum like all the other subjects the students have to study,  is NOT the same, because you can see that the immigrant who does not have a formal education in their host country, usually ends up “learning” the language whereas they do not end up “learning” Physics.