The company I work for provides educational resources for teaching English in a variety of classrooms across India. Some of these classrooms are in very remote rural and tribal areas. We've seen a lot of good success in implementing our program, provided that (1) the classroom has some basic audio or video infrastructure and (2) the teacher is proficient enough to read our lesson plans.
Some of our partner organizations have remarked that children in these classrooms seem to automatically know when they should "inherit" the language of the recordings we provide rather than the language used by their teachers. At a casual level, I can relate to the idea--we tend to pick up words and phrases from people we feel are good role models for language, but I've always assumed that to be a function of being able to identify "good" language. This observation by our partners has naturally led to us producing more audio- or video-based materials that the teacher just has to play in the classroom.
Ultimately, however, we don't want to develop a program that "replaces" the teacher.
I'm looking for some studies, articles or other references that can help me understand how language learners might "naturally" differentiate the quality of the input they are receiving even if they have limited proficiency in the language being learnt. This understanding should help us strike a balance between the role of the teacher as a teacher, and as that of merely being a facilitator.
