Name: British Council Interviews Stephen Krashen part 1 of 3
Uploaded: 2024-12-23T10:12:40.000Z
Duration: 18 min 33 s
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You have handouts. Today is a high-tech conference, so I brought handouts. Some of you have never seen handouts before. Okay, it's a piece of paper on both sides and it's an outline of my speech. I don't use PowerPoint. I didn't know what PowerPoint was until a year ago.

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I thought it was a martial art. I have a black belt in PowerPoint, okay? And I notice when people use these things, one time out of four, they don't work. Isn't that true? And also with the new technology, here's one of my many comments on technology, by the time you figure out how to use it, it's obsolete. Isn't that true? Actually, I wrote a song about technology too. I should sing it to you. I just remember the first few verses. It goes like this. Hush, little baby, singing to you, Papa's gonna buy you an iPad 2. When that iPad's obsolete, Papa's gonna buy you an iPad 3. When that 3 don't work no more, Papa's gonna buy you an iPad 4. And on it goes, okay?

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I would like to thank today Oxford for getting me here, for Isil for inviting me, and for my personal bodyguard, Nafi Osmanek, who's been putting up with me and my bad jokes for the last two days. I'd like to begin by giving a very brief review of the last 40 years of my life. If you look on your handout, this is really easy to read if you're 25 years old or under, okay? Oh, I didn't mention this. Technology, yeah. Other people have mentioned this before. Thank you so much. I have a website. In California, it is a state law that you must have a website. So I have a website. It's sdcrash, and D is my middle name, David.

I'm on Twitter. Please join me on Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter, I'm trying to catch up to Justin Bieber, okay? I'm getting close. He has how many followers does Justin Bieber have? Come on, techie people. 30. 30 million. He's number two. Number one is Lady Gaga.

I'm going to catch up with Justin. I call him Justin. The rate I'm going in another 1,325 years, I'm confident I'm going to make it. I've been taking omega-3 fatty acids, so this is going to happen. So please join me on these things. I got into Facebook about two years ago, three years ago, and I discovered there was already a Steve Krashen fan club on Facebook. I said, oh, this is nice. There were 60 people on the fan club. I looked at the list. 30 of them were my relatives, my cousins, my nieces, and I was very thrilled with that. It was nice. So I use Facebook and Twitter very seriously. They're for getting information around, and I'm really pleased with both of them. Twitter and Facebook are underground. It's the way we get information because the media doesn't always talk about education correctly. Isn't this true? Say yes. Yes, you bet. So this is our way of getting information around. Very important. So please join me. Two views of language acquisition or development of language. There are two competing hypotheses. It is really a war between these two hypotheses, and it's a good war. The good war is because no matter who wins, we learn things. As the struggle is happening in academia, experiments back and forth, we're testing, we're learning more. The hypothesis I think is right is called... Am I doing that?

What's happening? Oh, there's another mic in front of me? Or I'm not breathing correctly.

This is it. Okay. See, I have to start all over again. I wrote a new song. Let's see.

I did that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, my. The comprehension hypothesis says the way we acquire language, the way we develop literacy is through comprehension. When we understand what people tell us, when we understand what we read, we are acquiring the language if we understand it. The comprehension hypothesis says that the so-called skills, vocabulary, grammar, all those things, are the result of language acquisition. Making a big important point. The opposing hypothesis, the rival hypothesis, is called the skill building hypothesis.

This hypothesis says, no, the skills come first. In other words, there's a difference here in causality, in cause and effect. First, you learn your grammar. Then, you study vocabulary and you memorize it. Then, you practice it over and over. Then, someday in the distant future, you will actually be able to understand and produce language. In other words, the causality is reversed. The skill building hypothesis is delayed gratification. The comprehension hypothesis is immediate gratification. Listen to good stories, read books, have conversations, watch good movies, have a good time. The more you enjoy it, the better your acquisition will be. It means you deserve happiness now. You don't have to wait. Thanks, Chuck. It goes just right. We had worked this out a little bit. Thank you.

The problem is the delayed gratification never comes. No one has ever acquired or developed knowledge of a language this way. It has never happened in the history of the human race.

Not only that, skill building is painful. Comprehension is pleasant. The comprehension hypothesis is win-win. The skill building hypothesis is lose-lose. The problem is that for the general public, the skill building hypothesis is not a hypothesis. It's an axiom.

The general public believes this is true. All politicians believe it. If you think about, if you believe in skill building, all the things we get from our governments all over the world make perfect sense. Lots of testing, lots of discipline, make school hard, lots of homework, et cetera. But I don't think it's true. I think that the comprehension hypothesis is right. The exciting thing that happened to me 25 years ago when I read a book by Frank Smith and reading, reading is a form of comprehensible input. And that's very exciting for us. Especially one kind of reading that helps more than any other, the kind of reading that some of you did last night before you went to sleep. Reading because you want to. Reading you select yourself. Free, voluntary reading. Our research over the last 25 years shows again and again, free, voluntary reading, reading for pleasure, is the most powerful tool we have in all of language education. What the results are saying again and again, and it's again overwhelming, free, voluntary reading is the source of our reading ability, our writing ability, the ability to write respectable prose, the ability to handle complex grammatical constructions. A lot of our vocabulary, all of our educated vocabulary just about comes from reading. Most of our ability to spell, all this comes from reading. A powerful form of comprehensible input. The evidence for the comprehension hypothesis, and I'll try again to summarize 35 years into a couple of minutes here. I'll just give you a brief outline. This is in all the books and papers and articles and all that. Check out the website. By the way, I'm putting more and more stuff on the website.

The reason for this is that books are too expensive. Have you noticed that? Somebody open this for me. Thank you. Open this, yeah. I can't do it with one hand. See while I'm holding this? Great. Thank you so much. Okay. As we say, l'chaim. Cheers. Books are expensive.

Journals are expensive. I've decided to give as much away as I can because nobody can afford it. I won't mention the name of the publisher, Multilingual Matters. They came out with a book about three years ago called Poverty and Education. It sold for $160 US, a hard cover. The irony escaped them. I had an article on the comprehension hypothesis in a book about comprehension and input. I wrote the paper. The book came out and it was selling for $120 US. I couldn't afford copies at author's discount. I was lucky. They sent me one. I had to beg for another one. This has got to stop. One way to stop it is to give things away. There. Should we talk about The Grateful Dead?

Yeah. They started all this. Did you know that? When The Grateful Dead were touring, this isn't in my script. I thought I'd tell you. I was inspired by the music. When The

Grateful Dead were touring, these were the days when people were copying songs and they were illegally recording them at the concerts and sharing the recordings. There was a lot of effort to stop it. The Grateful Dead decided to let it happen. They said, okay, everybody, take out your recorders. Do it. We love it. Share it with your friends. They decided they weren't going to make money on recordings. They were going to make money on touring.

As some of you know, The Grateful Dead concerts became like whole villages coming together.

They did very, very well. This is going to have to be a change. I think we are part of it in the technology world to get information across to people easily. All this stuff is in the papers and stuff on the internet.

To make it briefly, we have a lot of evidence this is true. Studies that compare comprehension versus skill building. If you do it in second language, you do it beginning, you do it intermediate.

You look at reading studies. Kids who do whole language versus heavy drill stuff. Kids who do lots and lots of reading versus traditional instruction. Comprehensible input has won in every single one of these studies. When we look at when they're set up properly. It is never, ever lost. Experimental studies show it. Multivariate analysis, something

I love, shows this a lot when you do studies where statistically you can put skill building versus comprehension. Comprehension always wins. Case histories show it. I'm a big fan of case histories. Case histories are great if you have a lot of them. If you only have one, you don't know what the significant factor is. But if you do a lot of them, you see commonalities.

So there's overwhelming evidence. The rival hypothesis, skill building, doesn't fail once.

It fails again and again. It can't possibly be true. One argument against it, you can't learn grammar and vocabulary one rule at a time. There's too much there. Vocabulary is a very popular example. The average native speaker of English knows between 50,000 and 150,000 words. That's not 50,000 trips to the dictionary. That's not 50,000 flash cards.

It can't be done. Former student of mine, Victoria Rodrigo, did a study looking at Spanish speakers, first and second language. She determined, looked at vocabulary size, that many second language acquirers who read a lot had larger vocabularies than native speakers who didn't read a lot. So it's got to come from this. In fact, my feeling is that probably all of you in this room, those of you who speak English as a second language, who read a lot, which is most of the people in the room, I am sure that you have larger vocabularies in English than George W. Bush. Those of you who are offended by the political nature of my remarks, it will get worse. So not only is there too much there, it cannot be done, but the system is too complicated. We know that grammar is incredibly complicated. We know that the grammarians don't know all the rules. The people who write grammar books know fewer rules. Grammar teachers, the most fanatic, dedicated, know fewer rules. Our best students don't learn all the rules that are presented. They don't remember all the rules they've learned. So this is a, you can master maybe a tiny, tiny portion of the language.

So complexity just, I think, completely wipes out skill building as a possibility. Also, it's possible to acquire language and get very good at it with no conscious knowledge at all. You can get acquisition without learning. The literature is full of cases like this.

I'll tell you about one that I studied about 15 years ago, fascinating case. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times got in touch with me. Jerk, he didn't include me in the article when he wrote it. Gosh. Anyway, he told me, I'd like you to meet this guy in the San Fernando

Valley in Los Angeles, kind of a suburban area. He's an immigrant from Mexico and he works in an Israeli restaurant and he's acquired Hebrew by working in the restaurant. Now that's interesting. So I went to the restaurant and I met this guy, Armando, the case of Armando.

He came to the United States when he was a teenager. He had maybe a fifth or sixth grade education in Spanish in Mexico. He'd been in the United States for about 10 years. His

English was good, but he said his Hebrew was better. He was not trying to be Jewish. He was not trying to be Israeli. He liked the people in the restaurant and they liked him.

You meet these people. I met him and in about two minutes, you like him. You know the kind of person I know, just friendly, easy, kind of like us, right? Just easygoing, nice. And he told me his story. I asked him about it. I said, how did you do this? He says, well, just hanging out, listening. Did you start talking right away? No, silent period. He didn't say anything for the first year, the first two years. Gradually, one word here and there, et cetera. He made friends in the restaurant. He was integrated into the family, into the Moroccan Jewish family that owned the restaurant. In fact, when he was in an automobile accident, he was put in a local hospital. The family brought him meals three times a day while he was in the hospital. I tested his language. I had my recorder and

I recorded him with a friend of his and I asked him to just have a conversation in Hebrew and tell me what you did yesterday. So they had a conversation. I interrupted here and there and pushed it along, but they did very well. Nice conversation. I recorded it. He sounded great to me. I'm not terrific in Hebrew, but he sounded okay. I took the recording to the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles the next day. I played it for four native speakers of Hebrew. One said, he's a native speaker. Another said, he's an immigrant, but he's really good. Another one said, he's an immigrant from Ethiopia, but he's good. A fourth one said, he's an immigrant from Morocco. He's a Moroccan family, so he got the language.

Not educated, some slang, but everything was fine. He's okay. So the range was from very good to perfect. That's impressive. So then I talked to him again. I said, when you speak

Hebrew, do you know the rules? When you make this past tense, do you know what you're saying and you change this vowel? He says, I haven't the slightest idea of any of the rules. He has the language without attempting to, without doing the grammar. Pure acquisition, listening and integrating into the social group. These cases are not unusual. Everybody seems to know about them except us. They are the rule, not the exception.