Krashen and "Krashenite"

[aaleks]

I can't say I agree because the change in language learning from the 'traditional' way to media and reading input - plus naturalistic speaking rather than sentence translation - changed before Krashen properly entered the fray or at least simultaneously.

At least since the 70s the BBC started teaching languages in an input way, tentatively at first.

English learning is not a good laboratory study in my opinion because it is so present there is no comparison with learning languages where it is more difficult to 'immerse'. Languages where they aren't filtering through into the culture via media.

For the record . I didn't have English in school. I was taught German, and I was taught the traditional way. I've once found my old school German notbook from 10th grade, it was all about grammar and translation. And that was the 90's, not the 70's. As far as I know, now it would be grammar + communicative methods. Input is still not so popular outside of language communities. I'm afraid most people know nothing about the approach, and have never heard about Krashen, let alone his predecessors. The grammar based approaches are still very alive and kicking. At least, that's how things are where I live.

[devilyoudont]

The error in the strict discover-yourself schemes is that they don't take notice of the possibility that you might be better at seeing patterns if you have been told where to look - and on top of that being offered a place to get your own deductions refuted or confirmed.

I will go a step further and say there is an error in absolute faith that you won't draw incorrect conclusions from the patterns that you see based on biases caused by your lived experience (in the case of this particular skill: this bias would be your native language). Even if it happened that a small child and an adult do learn in exactly the same way, there's still a reality that when someone learns their first language they do not have those biases which may permanently mislead them. I'm sure it's happened to everyone in some area of your life... you saw a pattern, you thought you understood it because of something else you previously learned... Turns out you were totally wrong and you possibly acted according to an incorrect framework for an incredibly long time. I believe it can happen with languages too, meaning I personally will probably never try an input-only approach. But! I personally enjoy reading grammar books in my target language, so I guess in a technical sense you could combine the two approaches and wind up with an input-only approach which nevertheless contained specific grammar instruction.

[Random Review]

The error in the strict discover-yourself schemes is that they don't take notice of the possibility that you might be better at seeing patterns if you have been told where to look - and on top of that being offered a place to get your own deductions refuted or confirmed.

I will go a step further and say there is an error in absolute faith that you won't draw incorrect conclusions from the patterns that you see based on biases caused by your lived experience (in the case of this particular skill: this bias would be your native language). Even if it happened that a small child and an adult do learn in exactly the same way, there's still a reality that when someone learns their first language they do not have those biases which may permanently mislead them.

As I understand it (I might be wrong about this and I'm open to correction), this might have been part of where Krashen and at least some other researchers were trying to go with the early morpheme acquisition studies. Bracketing for a moment that I think those studies have been comprehensively proven wrong (because I need to find the paper I have in mind), I see what you're talking about every day. I want to give a concrete example: subject wh questions.

Italian students (and IIRC Spanish students too*) are prone to misinterpreting these as object "wh" questions with a postposed subject.
This means you can ask Italian students a question like, "What eats rabbits?" and a certain percentage will give you an answer like "grass" or "carrots". Yes, this percentage does get smaller as students progress, but it is genuinely hard for many of them NOT to parse it this way and I have seen it persist in intermediate students. It takes a lot of work from both student and teacher to change that.
Personally (I'm not particularly dogmatic about it and not trying to convince anyone), I've come reluctantly to the conclusion that the Krashenites (and many others who aren't Krashenites to be fair!) are probably right that acquisition is mainly driven by input, but *what* input?
I Personally think (and here I am trying to convince) that these students could get hours and hours of input chosen for interesting content and never come across enough input that disconfirms this; whereas teachers or self-learners guided by explicit knowledge can and do craft targeted input to help them acquire a grammar that more closely approximates the various native ones.

If it were just this one thing, it might be coincidence that this is quite common for Italian and Spanish students and extremely rare for, say, Chinese students; but it's not this one thing- this kind of thing is the rule rather than the exception.

TL;DR I see what you're both talking about every day as an EFL teacher.


* based on my memories of my time in Spain 2014-16.

[Cainntear]

The error in the strict discover-yourself schemes is that they don't take notice of the possibility that you might be better at seeing patterns if you have been told where to look - and on top of that being offered a place to get your own deductions refuted or confirmed.

Indeed, and one of the repeated criticisms of Krashen is the idea of noticing -- people can ignore what they hear if they understand the message, and they don't learn it if they don't notice it.

I will go a step further and say there is an error in absolute faith that you won't draw incorrect conclusions from the patterns that you see based on biases caused by your lived experience (in the case of this particular skill: this bias would be your native language). Even if it happened that a small child and an adult do learn in exactly the same way, there's still a reality that when someone learns their first language they do not have those biases which may permanently mislead them.

Absolutely. What I'm heartily sick of is Krashen fans brushing that away and saying "that's because they spoke before they were ready". It's an unprovable statement, because you can't know errors in someone's grammar until they speak, which leaves you in a "how long is a piece of string" type situation.

On top of this, though, there seems to be a tendency for brains not to accept a rule/pattern until they're sure about it. Mondria cites his own research in his fifth myth of vocabulary acquisition to say that learning vocabulary by inference doesn't appear to result in better acquisition, but seems to measurably slow the process of acquisition -- it wasn't the inference in his study that helped, but the practice. Yes, that's vocab, not grammar, but it feels right to me -- I've always struggled to work with rules and patterns when I'm not confident what they mean.

I see what you're talking about every day. I want to give a concrete example: subject wh questions.

Italian students (and IIRC Spanish students too*) are prone to misinterpreting these as object "wh" questions with a postposed subject.
This means you can ask Italian students a question like, "What eats rabbits?" and a certain percentage will give you an answer like "grass" or "carrots". Yes, this percentage does get smaller as students progress, but it is genuinely hard for many of them NOT to parse it this way and I have seen it persist in intermediate students. It takes a lot of work from both student and teacher to change that.
Personally (I'm not particularly dogmatic about it and not trying to convince anyone), I've come reluctantly to the conclusion that the Krashenites (and many others who aren't Krashenites to be fair!) are probably right that acquisition is mainly driven by input, but *what* input?

Why have you come to that conclusion?
Cos it's all well and good recognising that what you are doing isn't working, but you can't say that what you aren't doing would work.

I think what is key is a far more woolly thing of "engagement" with the language.

Communicative language teaching fails not because the core principle is wrong (that communicating using the language gives an opportunity for rehearsal and refining one's "theory" of the target language) but that it makes no sense in a classroom setting, because the people you are communicating with don't actually have the language model you're trying to acquire anyway -- so when L1 interference hits, it reinforces itself in the community language. This is the big problem in classroom-based language teaching -- free practice can be impractical and even counter-productive in a class with a shared L1. This is where I think Krashen gets it most wrong: it's not about speaking "too early", it's about speaking to people who themselves are "too early". But with controlled practice, this is less of an issue... assuming corrective feedback from a proficient teacher.

I Personally think (and here I am trying to convince) that these students could get hours and hours of input chosen for interesting content and never come across enough input that disconfirms this; whereas teachers or self-learners guided by explicit knowledge can and do craft targeted input to help them acquire a grammar that more closely approximates the various native ones.

You're certainly right that truly "natural" methods are less useful than planned exposure -- it seems that it's not about getting "enough" input as much as it is about getting dense enough input: if you don't see enough examples of a pattern in reasonable quick succession, you won't ever notice the pattern.

But we can force people to attend to the pattern by more explicit teaching and controlled practice -- output can be immediately identified as wrong.

[Random Review]

Why have you come to that conclusion?
Cos it's all well and good recognising that what you are doing isn't working, but you can't say that what you aren't doing would work.

What conclusion? That it seems mainly to be driven by input? I'm certainly not convinced it must be right; but I'm attracted enough to certain ideas about first language acquisition to think that's where the balance of probability seems to lie for me at the moment. It's not really something I feel strongly about, I'm quite happy if you can point me at studies showing the contrary. I would emphasise that I don't mean that in a points-scoring kind of way. I would be literally happy to be shown that. It's not that I'm not unhealthily attached to certain ideas about language learning (I surely am); but it being mainly driven by input isn't one of them.

Communicative language teaching fails not because the core principle is wrong (that communicating using the language gives an opportunity for rehearsal and refining one's "theory" of the target language) but that it makes no sense in a classroom setting, because the people you are communicating with don't actually have the language model you're trying to acquire anyway -- so when L1 interference hits, it reinforces itself in the community language.

Agreed. I'm not a fan of communicative language teaching and agree with everything you just said. Back before this online crap i.e. when I planned my own lessons, I used to spend hours of my own time planning as precisely as possible to try and minimise that and other weaknesses. Whether I succeeded or not is up for debate I guess; but it's certainly not possible now that I'm teaching cookie cutter lesson plans provided for me. This was actually one of the things I was going to write about in my log this week (plug plug plug).

This is the big problem in classroom-based language teaching -- free practice can be impractical and even counter-productive in a class with a shared L1. This is where I think Krashen gets it most wrong: it's not about speaking "too early", it's about speaking to people who themselves are "too early". But with controlled practice, this is less of an issue... assuming corrective feedback from a proficient teacher.

That bit in bold is precisely what I always tried to do when I planned my own classes. I'm not sure why you feel the need to preach to the choir on this based on one remark I made about targeted input.

Anyway and FWIW, I had an experience this week that might back you up on that point. I had a group class (it's an "on demand" service, so I didn't know the students). One of them was from Thailand and had much better grammar and pronunciation than typical for the level (both much fewer errors and different kinds of errors) and at the end of the class, I asked her if she watched a lot of YouTube and she did. At this point, a student from Hong Kong who was very aware that she didn't have the same control over English said that she also did that though and asked what else the Thai student did. It then transpired that the Thai student spent hours every week talking with native speakers. The student from Hong Kong also spoke English, but with other learners with the same L1. It's just an anecdote, but it's suggestive that your point is on the right track.

You're certainly right that truly "natural" methods are less useful than planned exposure -- it seems that it's not about getting "enough" input as much as it is about getting dense enough input: if you don't see enough examples of a pattern in reasonable quick succession, you won't ever notice the pattern.
[But we can force people to attend to the pattern by more explicit teaching and controlled practice -- output can be immediately identified as wrong.

I used to do a lot of it when I planned my own lessons for my own classes. You need a relationship with the students to do it though. In an on-demand service, a lot of students don't want it, some don't feel safe being corrected (by someone they don't know in a class full of strangers). In a class of your own, you can almost always persuade students of the need for that kind of thing, build trust with them, make it fun and target it to their needs- i.e build a culture; in an on-demand service for students you don't know, you can only try anything at all very tentatively and respect their wishes if they don't want it.


Cainntear, I have long respected you a lot, so it makes me feel sad that you seem to have a mistaken view of my approach to teaching. I still have a lot of weaknesses as a teacher, but I can assure you that being blind to the weaknesses of the communicative methods or being against (as opposed to unsure about) controlled practice aren't among them. I'm quite ambivalent about controlled practice and there's a lot I don't quite understand about how it could work; but I definitely think it is absolutely needed if you are using a communicative approach and I did use it. Successfully or unsuccessfully (and I'm happy to receive constructive criticism on that) I worked bloody hard to try and ameliorate the problems with communicative teaching (regularly starting work 3 hours early in Indonesia to try and plan my way around this crap while keeping the students engaged). Now that I don't even have the freedom to do that for my group classes, I hate my job and am literally contemplating going back to washing dishes until real teaching jobs come back (if they ever do). It's only my private classes that keep me sane (the bosses don't seem to mind if you deviate from their lesson plans with regular private-class students as long as the students are happy).

[Le Baron]

I'm a simple fellow in many ways and I do like Ockam's Razor. There's much 'theory' whirling around this topic, but fundamentally the important basic facts seem to me to be:

1. You have to live in a language to really know it inside out. That means it has to be the language which is the means to achieving all your daily requirements: physical, social, psychological.
2. People born into a language have several advantages an L2 learner of X language does not: nothing against which to judge their acquired language; exposure morning, noon and night over a very extended period; self-realisation (or the expression of it) and understanding of the world around them through the medium of that language.

However, native speakers aren't just left to their own devices with the language for it to just aimlessly wash over them. Guidance, direct and indirect, in your native language begins as soon as you utter your first words. All that 'magic' stuff that occurs before you ever speak as a child is something really no-one, including Krashen, knows how to actually harness or apply to adult second-language acquisition. Largely I think because it is a one-shot thing; once you've been socialised into a language (or two let's say for the sake of bilingualism) the game changes.

We know that with adult learning there is more to it than just 'exposure' input. Otherwise those people who live in a country for 20 years and never learn the language would not exist. So it has to be active engagement with input; like you seeing someone use a hammer to knock in a nail, whereupon you then pick up a hammer because you want to/need to knock in a nail. Seeing/hearing and then doing, and with active feedback in order to know more-or-less that what you are doing is the 'right' thing.

Every L2 learner should recognise and accept that they are essentially 'tainted' as a blank canvas for acquisition. The hardest thing is to attempt to switch off all the critical faculties relating to your native language's structure. The very act of saying 'how do I say...[whatever question in your L1]?' is a case of you not being like a child learner. So to 'acquire' you have to just accept EVERY facet of the L2 as it is presented to you, never question its structure, its meanings and methods in comparison to your L1 (or any other language you use fluently). That is what pure acquisition is like. Personally I don't think this is how adults learn languages, it's only ever going to partly like that because you don't want to spend the 15-20 years it takes for a child to go from zero to professionally competent. That latter is also why people who imagine they will in record time go from zero to competent enough to function at a professional level, whilst not living their every waking moment in the target language, are living in a total fantasy world.

So what do you do as an adult learner? You harness just a part of how you learned your L1. In fact the way you learn almost every other skill. Just like driving, painting, building furniture, playing an instrument. The question of being taught vs teaching yourself is a big question. Since being taught means being shown 'a way' and a particular example to follow which you only have to acquire as is. Just like how I learned the steps of tailoring from my father, which differs from the myriad other methods of tailoring out there. Since there are many roads to the same destination. Once you become a competent you have the skill to then manipulate what you know. The adage is old: learn the rules before you break rules.
Self-teaching is harder. It's more random, since you never know whether you're pursuing a dead-end and wasting valuable time. Or if the sum total of what you do, including all the dead ends, are actually just part of achieving the overall result. Many roads to the same destination. Some longer, some shorter, some fuller and some emptier. It's as good to have a guide for at least part of a journey as it is to be an independent traveller.

Apologies for rambling. I have time on my hands.

[zenmonkey]

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

Poly-glot-a-lot

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.

Heady Betty and Spider Tacos - TPRS Spanish - Level One

Ha, I just stumbled across a different Jeff Brown video.


How to acquire any language NOT learn it!

He talks about learning/acquiring Arabic in a year.
It's a big push for the 'natural method' & TPRS.

Oh, and 3/4 in we discover he moved to Egypt for 3 months and just did a lot of exchanges.
Pretty impressive results.

[zenmonkey]

19 days in with Farsi. Holy cow. (He already speaks Arabic) This is impressive.

[Dragon27]

19 days in with Farsi.

There's an extra space in the beginning of the youtube video ID, which prevents the video from displaying, btw.

edit: fixed

[Le Baron]

That where he 'acquired' Arabic is well and good, but the starting position is not level in comparison to most learners. In the first place he's outputting early on and he just hires loads of teachers to help him in person! And as you say he skipped off to Egypt. Isn't he also employed as a languages professor?

I get soup with a rusty nail vibes from these sort of people.

Speaking of 'Krashenism' though it seems to me people just take his name and pin all their own views into it most of the time. The people who say: 'listen forever, never speak until you're ready' (which is often never). And then you have this sort of video: