Learned and acquired language

In the distinction made by Stephen Krashen, learning language is a conscious and often instructed process in contrast to the natural acquisition. And while acquisition is a communicative process taking place in everyday life, learning a language has an external focus on language, metalanguage and the rules of grammar and phonology. And most importantly, if the goal is communication and thought processing acquisation is the only direct strategy.

Learning strategies might of course have acquisition as their side effect when the students are motivated for learning and discussing the language from this kind of perspective, but with children as my main focus I doubt this will be the case very often.

My challenge then, is to make the leap from the very obvious conscious process of teaching English in a set time and place marked in every student's timetable as English, to a subconscious acquisition of language. 

Assuming Krashen is right that that acquisition is the only good way to learn a new language, I already know that this process is present in Norwegian schools. It might be debated to what degree the students master English, but I claim that every class produce at least a few good language users.

Today I will study Krashens theories closer and get to know the gray areas between conscious and subconscious language.