Krashen and "Krashenite"

General discussion about learning languages
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Cainntear » Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:54 am

smallwhite wrote:Would and how would Krashen’s theories apply to our L1?

Krashen's theory takes the assumption that L2 is the same as L1, which means that his theories shouldn't strictly affect how we think about L1 acquisition.

That said, it's always an interesting exercise to compare any pedagogy or method that claims to be based on "how kids learn" and show how actually... that's not how kids learn.

For one thing, when it comes to natural order of acquisition, learner problems with the -s suffix in English are often compared to young kids' difficulties with the same thing... but then again, even though most infants make very obvious errors with this, every single native-speaker of English overcomes that at quite an early stage, with most kids having completely acquired the rule before school age. That's when the goal-posts start getting moved and the natural order becomes a vague, amorphous, meaningless concept.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby jeffers » Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:33 am

I think a lot of the characterizations of Krashen in this thread are somewhat exaggerated. For example, in this thread I read that he teaches "any time put towards studying grammar has been completely wasted", and "[grammar] doesn't need to be explicitly taught". I haven't read much Krashen, but in an article I recently read he wrote, "Consciously learned rules can fill some of these gaps", and he ends the section with the statement, "Grammar, thus, is not excluded. It is, however, no longer the star player but has only a supporting role." (Both quotes from 2004).

I'm not here to defend Krashen, but to say that his ideas have been very helpful, even if they must be taken with a grain of salt. But this is true of probably everything I have used to learn a language. Assimil beginner courses claim to take you to B2. I don't believe it, but I still find Assimil textbooks to be the best source of language learning. In the same way, I find Krashen's advice on the value of reading to be very useful in guiding my language learning, even if that doesn't mean I will stop studying grammar alongside my reading.

I couldn't say this for everyone, but I think that the statement "Grammar ...is ... no longer the star player but has only a supporting role" could describe the learning practices of a large number of users on this forum.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby luke » Wed Jun 30, 2021 1:57 pm

Deinonysus wrote:Now again, I do not have a PhD in linguistics or education so I can't provide an academic refutation of this, but I have to say that it makes no sense to me and goes against everything I have experienced as a learner.

Shut down the conservatories. Want to be an opera singer or concert pianist? Don't practice your scales, just listen to a ton of music and you'll be ready for the big time! Want to be an NBA player? Don't bother practicing lay-ups, just get a season pass on ESPN! Want to be a chess grandmaster? Don't bother learning opening theory or solving puzzles, just watch Twitch streams all day!

I am a classically trained singer and I have to say that producing the sounds of a new language requires just as much training, drilling, and muscle memory as any other task like learning to sing or play piano.


Absolutely brilliant! You have brightened my day!

On Krashen and his theories. I've found them helpful for bringing balance. Counterpoint to, "if I'm enjoying this, it can't be helping".

So by being somewhat polarizing, he pushed those who would not normally think something is necessary, to do enough of it to get great benefit. I'm not a linguist either, but he does seem to have been part of the movement towards extensive reading, extensive listening, etc.

Nicolaus Copernicus didn't solve the entire puzzle of planetary orbits, but he was important in the advancement of his field. He suggested calculating planetary orbits is much simpler if we "pretend" the Sun is the center of the solar system. (He didn't want to offend anyone who was certain the Earth is the center).

Krashen seems to have suggested a little, "lighten up, Francis" to his peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN-aXzpQUdw

That is, let them read Harry Potter and Star Trek novels. It's better than not doing anything, and for some, the key to opening a door that seems to be stuck.
Last edited by luke on Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby lysi » Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:33 pm

luke wrote:So by being somewhat polarizing, he pushed those who would not normally think something is necessary, to do enough of it to get great benefit. I'm not a linguist either, but he does seem to have been part of the movement towards extensive reading, extensive listening, etc.

Nicolaus Copernicus didn't solve the entire puzzle of planetary orbits, but he was important in the advancement of his field. He suggested calculating planetary orbits is much simpler if we "pretend" the Sun is the center of the solar system. (He didn't want to offend anyone who was certain the Earth is the center).

Krashen seems to have suggested a little, "lighten up, Frances" to his peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN-aXzpQUdw

That is, let them read Harry Potter and Star Trek novels. It's better than not doing anything, and for some, the key to opening a door that seems to be stuck.


jeffers wrote:I'm not here to defend Krashen, but to say that his ideas have been very helpful, even if they must be taken with a grain of salt.


This is how I feel as well. Even if he's not right, his contributions have been significant. If his ideas weren't as polarizing, I doubt language learning would have changed as it did and moved away from grammar translation and audiolingual methods, nor would input have been as prioritized as it is now. Another thing that I like about Krashen is how he says that language learning aptitude only affects explicit learning, so under his view, it's possible to be "bad at learning languages" but not "bad at acquiring languages", which is another common concern that people have. Of course, there is implicit learning aptitude, and it's a fairly recent topic of research, but saying "oh well, it's possible that you're worse at acquiring languages, but probably not that much and it's not actually all that significant" isn't going to convince someone to try language learning again if they're certain that they can't learn languages from their bad experience in school. Sometimes it's important to be wrong in order to set things right.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Cainntear » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:39 pm

jeffers wrote:I think a lot of the characterizations of Krashen in this thread are somewhat exaggerated. For example, in this thread I read that he teaches "any time put towards studying grammar has been completely wasted", and "[grammar] doesn't need to be explicitly taught". I haven't read much Krashen, but in an article I recently read he wrote, "Consciously learned rules can fill some of these gaps", and he ends the section with the statement, "Grammar, thus, is not excluded. It is, however, no longer the star player but has only a supporting role." (Both quotes from 2004).

And this is what makes Krashen such a bloody nuisance to debate. His whole thing is full of hedges, caveats and contradictions, and the minute you criticise what he has actually said, you get hit with something else he actually said, as though that proves he didn't say what he said in the first place.

Studying grammar has no effect whatsoever on acquisition. But that doesn't mean it doesn't affect acquisition.
There's a natural order. But you can't write it out in order.
Learners have to have input that is "i+1" and comprehensible, because they need to be able to understand the entire message to acquire the unknown language. But you can give them something that's i+n and incomprehensible, because even though the can't understand the entire message, there will be parts of it that will be i+1 and comprehensible for them, even though they're not the full message and most of the context is a fog of incomprehensible language.

But the problem is that most of Krashen's core hypotheses are self-evidently wrong, and he just keeps twisting them to avoid criticism.
The ones that aren't self-evidently wrong are impractical to the point of practical impossibility -- i+1 is undefinable, and even if you could define it, you can't do it in a classroom as everyone's "i" is different, so there's nothing that's "i+1" for everyone in the room.

I'm not here to defend Krashen, but to say that his ideas have been very helpful, even if they must be taken with a grain of salt. But this is true of probably everything I have used to learn a language.

And that's a massive problem. When someone takes part of the process of learning language and declares it the be-all-and-end-all, many people take it without a pinch of salt, and that unnecessarily misleads people.

While a lot of things that Krashen talks about are helpful, the way he talks about them is not, and the way other people talk about them is better.

He's indicative of a wider problem in social sciences: when one person stands up and tries to make some revolutionary grand universal theory, they get listened to; when 100 people stand up and try to move on the state of the art a step at a time, their work doesn't have the convenience of a single label, and gets all but ignored.

For example, everyone still keeps referring to Chomsky's generative grammars; a few months after he published them, a French linguist name Tesnière published about "valency grammars", an alternative model which completely fixed all the problems with Chomsky's model, but nobody knows Tesnière's name, because Chomsky was the "one big model" guy, and Tesnière only improved something that drastically needed improving. The problem with this is that Chomsky still gets discussed again and again and again, and this leads people to continue to use his fundamentally broken model of language. How broken? Well, Chomsky declared that grammar carried no meaning, which should be self-evidently false. That alone proves his model was wrong.

Anyhow, back to Krashen.

Perhaps what Krashen said and did was more revolutionary than I give him credit for. Perhaps he genuinely changed language teaching for the better. But that doesn't mean we should be discussing his views in his terms as relevant today, because thousands of teachers and researchers worldwide have moved things forward.

Krashen should be a history lesson, but many in the language learning world talk about him as current affairs.

I couldn't say this for everyone, but I think that the statement "Grammar ...is ... no longer the star player but has only a supporting role" could describe the learning practices of a large number of users on this forum.

There is no "star player", certainly in a good teacher's classroom. When people ask about the "most important part" of language learning, I ask them what the most important part of a car is.
Every part is important.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby leosmith » Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:47 am

I was watching an MMA fight last night, and a Krashen discussion broke out.

Although I agree with much of the criticism, I like the fact that Krashen popularized several key concepts in language learning that allow us to discuss them more easily. Some things I attribute to him:

Input - massive quantities of listening and reading are required to achieve a decent level. You can learn more efficiently if the input is somewhat, but not completely, comprehensible; graded readers are an application of this, for example.

Affective Filter - motivation, self-confidence, anxiety and personality traits can affect the ease with which you learn a language.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby lysi » Thu Jul 01, 2021 7:30 am

Cainntear wrote:Krashen should be a history lesson, but many in the language learning world talk about him as current affairs.


Indeed. It's a shame that there isn't really a field of history dedicated to studying second language acquisition (the name "Historical Linguistics" is already taken). It's interesting to think about the reasons for his popularity among teachers. I have my ideas, at least.

As a side note, we are now the 2nd result on google for "krashenite":
Image
Perhaps, once this thread dies down, it'll pop up back up every couple months or so because of a reply from someone who'll have found this thread on google, and who'll have made an account purely for replying.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby lysi » Thu Jul 01, 2021 6:57 pm

I recently re-read Krashen Burn and I thought I would post this quote from it:

But Krashen's real power is among teachers, thousands of whom have embraced his beliefs -- less because they have read any of the "research" than because Krashen makes them feel good about what they are already doing inside their classrooms.

At a Prop. 227 debate a few months ago, Krashen demonstrated his enormous talent for wooing teachers with emotional appeals. He became the instant hero in a huge auditorium packed with bilingual educators during a debate with Gloria Matta Tuchman, a widely respected Latina teacher who successfully uses near-immersion English to teach Mexican-American children.

As Tuchman tried to explain the downside of bilingual education, hundreds of teachers booed, hissed, and shouted insults. When Krashen spoke about the wonderful job teachers were doing with bilingual education, however, the applause was deafening.

"It was as if the entire room was in a shared hypnotic trance," says Matta Tuchman. "Thank God children don't act like that."

But the most unsettling moment came when the debate ended. Krashen was suddenly surrounded by throngs of teachers trying to get his attention, hug him, or merely touch his shoulder. Recalled one stunned non-educator in the audience: "An impromptu receiving line formed of teachers lining up for a chance to touch their guru, their Pied Piper. It was eery. It was the Church of Krashen."
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Kraut » Tue Jul 13, 2021 1:01 pm

A Krashenite lecturing to language teachers and delivering an example of his craft.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kYbqud5QAg
It's all about Input!

Stop forcing output and embrace input as the way of Language Acquisition! In this video Jeff Brown, professor, polyglot, and part-time stand-up comedian talks about the pitfalls of too much output and the benefits of input. Jeff Brown was keynote speaker at CCCFLC 2019 at Rio Honda Community College.


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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jul 13, 2021 9:19 pm

Kraut wrote:A Krashenite lecturing to language teachers and delivering an example of his craft.

What I hear is a lot of alarm bells.

He starts by repeating all the bold assertions of is, isn't, can and can't, and implicitly states that what a lot of language learners have actually done is impossible: learn a language with lots of practice and little input. In my case it was Corsican, which I didn't get to a high level with, and it wasn't my first Romance language, but while I could have readily understood it with little work, without the forced practice and self-output, I would not have been able to initiate or continue a conversation.

He mentions using yes/no questions to avoid having to use complicated language... but where does that leave a language that has no yes and no? Latin, Irish and Gaelic answer simple questions with an appropriately conjugated verb, so the technique immediately falls apart (Welsh is worse because the system is in an intermediate state of moving from conjugated verb to frozen forms, so there's a multiplicity of yeses and nos).

The fact that most textbooks included too many words is not an argument for input.

The fact that rote memorisation doesn't lead to fluency is not an argument for input.

Talking about "feeling" the language and speaking by feel... well a new language always feels wrong, and there are issues with case marking too: for me it's very easy to learn to "feel" a word in the case I most often encountered it in when I started -- the nouns and adjectives I've struggle most with declining in Gaelic are the ones I learnt before I was operating at a sophisticated level to be interacting with all the cases: the "feels right" form is always the nominative, and consciously overriding that incorrect feeling is sometimes necessary. I could not get der die das from feeling in German Duolingo, because the different cases just interfere with each other.

Reading and writing being a waste of time for beginners in Chinese, Japanese etc is not an argument for input.

He mentions Krashen's claim that learning meaning by reading is 10 times quicker than other vocab learning. This is the first time I've heard this claim as far as I'm aware. Either it's bullshit, or my TESOL lecturers weren't doing their jobs.

He doesn't like speaking, but he does speaking, and speaking isn't input, but it's not a waste of time. This is not an argument for input.

Then he talks about using high frequency vocab only -- not an argument for input.
Then his "sweet 16 verbs"... which as far as I can tell is just a specific example of high frequency vocabulary.
He uses TPR which has been criticised for focusing on imperatives at the expense of other tenses -- the imperative is the least useful conjugation in many ways.
Then TPRS...
...with collaborative input...
...which means students... ehmm... speak, right?
Lots of questions, many of which are yes/no (see above) but not all of which are.

He talks about making slow processors into fast processors is nonsensical -- turn a slow processor into a fast processor and then they become fluent? That's just a fancy way of saying "if you teach someone to do something, then they'll be able to do it" and yes, that means repetition... which is (again) not an argument for input!

Then he talks about a "special person" activity which seems to start with him talking a lot, but according to his demonstration leads to... the student speaking lots.

He then talks about vocabulary with images... doesn't pretty much every teacher use picture flashcards...? And it's not clear whether that relates to input or not.

He then starts talking about retelling stories and it's not really clear whether he does or not, because he says he does but doesn't but does. Very unclear. But what is clear is that there is some sort of retelling, which is output, not input.

He says there's no explicit grammar, and "instead" there is pop-up grammar... which by every definition I've seen is explicit grammar, just in short chunks focused specifically to the task at hand. And again, that's not about input.

He claims Krashen's done a lot of research that says correction doesn't work. But it does. And Krashen was never known for his rigorous empirical methods.

He talks about not forcing output, then says that he only makes the strong ones speak, but then goes on to tell us that he knows who his slow processors are and only asks them simple questions so they have to say yes or no. So he makes everyone speak. Which I do too. I ask my lower level students simpler questions than the higher level ones. All good teachers do this. It is not an argument for input.

And then he winds things up with a strawman about how you wouldn't teach a baby their first language with classroom techniques. Which is quite right. And you wouldn't use his classroom techniques to teach a baby either.

The talk is entitled "It's all about Input" when the talk is... not all about input.
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