Craig,

I'm putting my answers below, but I'm (predictably) going to quibble on the
wording in a couple of places, and I'm not up on reading-pedagogy, so I'm
probably doing the old politician's trick of taking what I think is the case
and assuming it's the consensus.

--- Bill Spruiell

> 1)  Acquiring a language is easy for a native speaker. It happens
> naturally, without direct instruction.

I think a lot of researchers would ask what "easy" means here. Children
acquire language largely unconsciously, but they practice a *lot*. They
don't make judgments about difficulty the way older kids and adults do, and
as adults, we don't remember what language-learning was like when we were
very young (except for some flashbulb memories, etc.). So, kids might
perceive the process as extremely hard -- but how would we know? They
certainly seem frustrated sometimes. When we say it's easy for them, what
we're really saying is something like, "Wow -- they're picking that up FAST.
It must be easy for them." And most of us haven't been in a 24-hour-a-day
foreign-language immersion program for two years, so we don't have a good
sense of how much *we'd* pick up in that time. Yes on the "naturally";
yes-ish on the "without direct instruction." There's lots of modeling in the
input, but that's indirect instruction by most standards.

> 2) Achieving high levels of literacy is hard, but for the most part it
> happens without direct instruction.

Yes on the first part. On the second part, whether being interactively read
with counts as direct instruction (e.g., caregiver with picture book reading
with child) would be important for characterizing a consensus position.

> 3) Acquiring the language of Standard English is hard, but for the most
> part it happens without direct instruction.
Yes on first part, no on second except for people who spend lots of time
reading material written in standard English and trying to interact.

> 4)  Learning to read complex texts is hard, but for the most part it
> happens without direct instruction.
Yes on first, second variable depending on what counts as "direct
instruction." Discussions *about* reading count?

> 5) Learning to write effectively is hard, but for the most part it
> happens without direct instruction.
Yes on the first. Usual issue with "direct instruction" on the second.

> 6) Learning about language is hard. It does not happen without direct
> instruction.
Depends on what it is about language that you're learning. Learning to
associate particular types of languages with different situations that you
interact in every day is -- if not easy -- fairly automatic. Becoming
*aware* of your own language use is much harder. Structurally analyzing
language requires direct instruction.

> Craig
> 
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