Name: British Council Interviews Stephen Krashen part 2 of 3
Uploaded: 2024-12-23T10:18:41.000Z
Duration: 21 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The imperative

Refer back to three aspects to come up with.

First of all, and this next one is so marvelous, it's so wonderful, it sets us free in terms of materials and language teaching.

The comparative

It says that if you give people enough comprehensible input, all the grammar they are ready to acquire is automatically there in the input.

You don't have to say, well, where is your I plus one today?

Lots of comprehensible input, it's there.

Just like the balanced diet has all the nutrition you need, all the vitamins.

You don't say, well, today I need more vitamin B3, so I think I'll eat this.

No, you have lots of interesting food and all of that takes care of itself.

I have a strong suspicion that this is absolutely true.

You can imagine, we no longer have to have targeted input.

For input to work, it has to be two things, comprehensible and interesting.

In fact, you can summarize the problem of language teaching like this.

It's very easy to give people input that's comprehensible but not interesting.

It's very easy to give people input that's interesting but not comprehensible.

My colleagues at the university devoted their lives to giving us input that is neither comprehensible nor interesting.

I've done the easy part, me and my colleagues.

The tough part is how do you make input interesting and comprehensible?

In fact, I'm going to raise the stakes higher.

So interesting you forget that it's in another language.

I got interested in this from the work of a colleague of mine, a former student, Christy Lau.

Christy works in San Francisco and the last few years she has set up and run a very interesting program for children and it's in Mandarin.

It's for children who have come from China or Taiwan and are forgetting their native language and it's for American children who've been in Mandarin immersion programs.

It's lots of stories and books and full of read-alouds and discussions and interesting things.

But Christy had one child, Jack, who didn't want to be in the program.

He was eight years old and he would much rather be skateboarding, which I think that's reasonable for an eight-year-old just to be with his friends and have a good time.

And no matter what Christy did, he wasn't interested.

He had come with his family from China and his Mandarin was beginning to go away as his English got stronger.

So the last day of school, the last day of the program, Christy said, okay, bye, thanks for trying it.

And she gave him some story books with pictures, the story of A Fan Ti, which is extremely popular in China for kids.

In fact, Jack got so interested in A Fan Ti, he asked his mother to read him the stories of A Fan Ti while he did the dishes.

He was never interested in Chinese, not interested in Mandarin.

And as she read the stories, his Mandarin was improving.

When they ran out of good books, it was over and his Mandarin started to degenerate again.

Normal people, and this does not include us, normal people in the world are not interested in language acquisition.

This is very similar, in fact, I think it's identical to a concept introduced by Mahali I won't spell it for you, called flow.

When you're in a state of flow, only the activity counts.

You know, during dinner, I watch a movie.

I didn't know there were all those vampires in American history.

They fought on the side of the Confederates of the South.

Two ways of making sure this happens, or encouraging it.

My colleague, Singhee Lee, has done studies on this.

You compare assigned reading with self-selected reading.

Even if you try to get the best possible books, self-selected makes much more progress.

I don't know about you, but I have a hard time when people give me books as presents.

No matter what, I never want to read them.

I'm setting you up for some more stuff later.

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British Council Interviews Stephen Krashen part 2 of 3

stuff

extremely

compelling

acquire