An alternative take on Krashen

[Le Baron]

For the avoidance of doubt: I did genuinely believe Krashen was a university language teacher. It's not that I was not sure, it's just that I had picked up the wrong idea and believed it to be true. Being mistaken is very different from not being sure.

Come on. I think I could survey random people on the street and pick up a majority of people who think Krashen is an academic linguist. Now, you have a linguistic background and didn't know?

Do less strategising and setting of unnecessary (and futile) 'traps'. Also stop thinking other people have missed subtle subtexts, they haven't.

[emk]

OK, the "was Krashen an academic linguistic or a language teacher" sub-thread feels like it's unlikely to add more to this topic.

But if people want to discuss Krashen's theories, please continue.

[Lawyer&Mom]

But I also think Krashen is flatly wrong, in a very important way: no amount of input will actually suffice for many people to produce output. There are plenty of heritage learners (and early AJATT students) with excellent listening and reading skills, but who would struggle through an A2 conversation. I know someone who happily watches gritty cop dramas in her heritage language, but who doesn't even have A2 output skills.

I would counter that this situation might not be interpreted as a failure. Excellent listening and reading skills are wonderful things on their own, and having A1.75 conversation skills thrown in as a free added extra doesn’t suck. That’s about where I am with French. My just under A2 output with B2 input lets me be a *really* good tourist. I can take tours in French, understand all the announcements, read all the signs and menus. I wouldn’t trade any of my passive skills for stronger active skills. Solid understanding does so much for a tourist.

[rdearman]

Come on. I think I could survey random people on the street and pick up a majority of people who think Krashen is an academic linguist. Now, you have a linguistic background and didn't know?
.

Results of the survey from the streets of London. 100,000 people were asked the question: Is Krashen an academic linguist or a teacher?

1. Academic linguist 0%
2. Teacher 0%
3. Who? 100%

[Iversen]

I treat theorists as I treated my teachers in school: if they have something I can use I listen, but I don't feel obliged to believe everything they say. And I would definitely not expect that I could master a field solely by listening to their teachings. Selfdirected selfstudy is at least as important as being nice and obedient and listen to whatever your teacher says.

In mathematics there is an expectation that everything sticks together - either proof is valid in its entirety or it isn't. Not so in linguistics (although Chomsky probably hoped so), and definitely not in language pedagogics. The nearest thing to a provable claim is a grammatical rule, but as Chomsky himself allowed any native speaker could in principle invalidate even the nicest rule by denying that its results are grammatical even though all his neighbours claim that they are perfectly OK. There is a reason that all major translating system now are based on statistics. This doesn't invalidate the attempt to create a comprehensive collection of grammatical rules and write them down in a grammar book, but the role of such a grammar book is mostly to summarize the linguistical behaviour of an unruly bunch of speakers in a pedagogical way. And that's one good reason to distrust any attempt to construct a contextfree grammar, shimmering above the ugly world like a Platonic idea. On the other hand there is a clear tendency for order to appear from chaos, and that's why most words are inflected according to a limited set of rules. But some amount of chaos will always cling to it.

Next step: once clever grammarians have summarized a set of empirically based rules it is totally absurd not to learn from it. If I know how to inflect the majority of Bulgarian nouns it is not because I have listened to thousands of hours of Bulgarian or read 10.000 pages (I haven't) - it's because I have looked on some tables (and worked with them to produce my own summaries in the form of green sheets), and because of that I now know how to interpret the things I meet in my Bulgarian study texts. I simply don't understand how Krashen could come to the totally contra-intuitive idea that it wouldn't help to see things nicely summarized in a grammar - it doesn't in any way invalidate the pattern building in your brain, it helps it to form those patterns faster and with fewer errors. On the other hand you should still be slightly wary of grammars - especially those that are built on great literature from the past and (to a lesser degree) present. There may be a lot of real living language patterns that never make it into such a grammar. Any grammar is to some extent normative simbly by being there and not including everything that happens in the real world.

So to revert to Krashen: I have adopted his formulation about comprehensible language, but rejected his way of using it (and his distrust of formal studies in particular). And similarly with Chomsky: he popularized the idea of transformations that make complicated utterances out of simpler ones, but apart from that his main contribution to linguistics has been to make it incomprehensible for ordinary learners.


To Lawyer&Mom: there isn't time to learn all languages, and it's perfectly logical to leave some of them as purely passive for practical reasons. After all that's what we do with all the different dialects and sociolects and idiolects and god knows what there are out there for any language. But once I have invested hundreds if not thousands of hours in a language it buggers me if I can't also use it - at least for writing things. Just as it would irritate me to be interested in art or music without having tried my own hand in them - but apparently most people don't mind being passive receivers of those things. On the other hand: if I haven't defined a language as a study object I'm perfectly happy with just knowing something about it - or being able to read it.

[orlandohill]

If I know how to inflect the majority of Bulgarian nouns it is not because I have listened to thousands of hours of Bulgarian or read 10.000 pages (I haven't) - it's because I have looked on some tables (and worked with them to produce my own summaries in the form of green sheets), and because of that I now know how to interpret the things I meet in my Bulgarian study texts.

If I understand correctly, studying grammar in this way is considered learning, but not acquisition in the terminology of Krashen's publications. Your conscious knowledge of grammar makes the texts you read more comprehensible, but the amount of language that can be acquired still has an upper bound that is determined by the amount of input you receive.

I simply don't understand how Krashen could come to the totally contra-intuitive idea that it wouldn't help to see things nicely summarized in a grammar

On which page of which publication does he say that? I have only recently begun to familiarise myself with his work, and a brief search brings up a publication where he says otherwise.

Krashen, Stephen D. "Formal grammar instruction. Another educator comments." TESOL quarterly 26.2 (1992): 409-411.

Does grammar study have any effect? My interpretation of the research is that grammar learning does have an effect, but this effect is peripheral and fragile. I have argued (Krashen,1982) that conscious knowledge of grammar is available only as a monitor, or editor, and that there are three necessary conditions for monitor use: Performers need to know the rule, have enough time to apply the rule, and need to be focused on form. When these conditions are met, application of grammar rules can indeed result in increased accuracy, but the performer pays a price in decreased information conveyed, and a slower, more hesitant speech style.

Here he's talking about the skill of spontaneous speech production, but it seems reasonable to assume that a monitor could also be applied to the reception of written input.

[tastyonions]

Has anyone ever tried to prove the big honking assumption in all of Krashen's work that "learning" and "acquisition" are entirely separate categories and that the former has absolutely zero role to play in the latter?

[Iversen]

If I understand correctly, studying grammar in this way is considered learning, but not acquisition in the terminology of Krashen's publications. Your conscious knowledge of grammar makes the texts you read more comprehensible, but the amount of language that can be acquired still has an upper bound that is determined by the amount of input you receive.

](Krashen has)argued (Krashen,1982) that conscious knowledge of grammar is available only as a monitor, or editor, and that there are three necessary conditions for monitor use: Performers need to know the rule, have enough time to apply the rule, and need to be focused on form.

I have downloaded one book by Krashen and read it, and as I remember it it was one long deprecation of grammar studies. I'm not going to waste my life on rereading it , but Orlandohill's quote with the three conditions illustrates his attitude quite well.

It seems that Krashen compares the immediate outcome of learning one grammatical rule with already having internalized the language and being able to use the construct described by the rule based on an IMMENSE lot of input. And the error comes already with describing the grammatical knowledge as a mere monitor. But that's not fair. My conscious knowledge of vocabulary and grammar will actually make me more, not less able to get something positive squeezed out of my input. And using bilingual texts/subtitles allows me to run through the different levels of input faster than if I had to guess my way throughout the process without help. So the amount of language that can be 'acquired' may still have an upper bound that is determined by the amount of input you receive, but by using the available resources intelligently you can get a higher dividend faster from whatever amount of input you can lay your hand (or head) on. Why try to talk learners from doing that?

[emk]

There is a reason that all major translating system now are based on statistics. This doesn't invalidate the attempt to create a comprehensive collection of grammatical rules and write them down in a grammar book, but the role of such a grammar book is mostly to summarize the linguistical behaviour of an unruly bunch of speakers in a pedagogical way. And that's one good reason to distrust any attempt to construct a contextfree grammar, shimmering above the ugly world like a Platonic idea.

As I mentioned recently in another thread, I own a rather delightful 1,800 page doorstop of an English grammar. It focuses on descriptive linguistics—the goal isn't to promote some grand unified theory of linguistics, but rather to carefully and systematically catalog all the raw evidence that any such theory would need to account for.

And the book is full of all kinds of weird little details. I frequently find myself saying, "Huh, I never noticed that before. But it makes sense! What an odd construction. But I've always followed that rule." The grammar of (standard written) English is highly structured. And native speakers agree on the written dialect, despite the vast majority of the rules never being taught. As do many advanced non-native speakers. And, rather curiously, the larger GPT systems can all obey these rules, too, despite lacking any kind of Language Acquisition Device or Universal Grammar.

So there really is a rich, logical structure to grammar. And people who read a lot agree on the "standard written" dialect to a remarkable extent. But nobody teaches the whole thing, except possibly to linguistics graduate students. Except even they are delighted to consciously notice a grammatical pattern that they have been unfailingly obeying all along.

But even though grammar is highly structured, the only algorithms that can really cope with that structure rely heavily on probability and statistics. And this should be unsurprising to those who follow obscure branches of parsing theory. To quote Norvig (emphasis added):

In 1967, Gold's Theorem showed some theoretical limitations of logical deduction on formal mathematical languages. But this result has nothing to do with the task faced by learners of natural language. In any event, by 1969 we knew that probabilistic inference (over probabilistic context-free grammars) is not subject to those limitations (Horning showed that learning of PCFGs is possible).

Now, "probabilistic context free grammars" are an over-simplified model of natural language. But even with CFGs, it's quite impossible to acquire language via strict logical deduction. You need to pay attention to frequencies, and to carefully weigh conflicting evidence, and to reach tentative (but well-supported) conclusions. And to do all that, your natural tools are probability and statistics. Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" is basically a way of saying "even with lots of data, you can't rule out many conflicting hypotheses, because you can't prove a negative." But if you see a pattern 1,000 times, and if you never see any counter-evidence, well, then you can't prove anything. But you sure know which way to bet.

So we learn these elaborate, and surprisingly logical structures. And we ultimately do most of it via unconscious acquisition. Because the grammar we learn is too damn big, and the majority of it is never taught anywhere. Chomsky chalks this mystery up to a poorly-dewscribed "Language Acquisition Device", which he sometimes acts as if it appeared in our brains by magic. But he severely underestimates how rich a grammar can be acquired via statistically inferring patterns from examples.

Next step: once clever grammarians have summarized a set of empirically based rules it is totally absurd not to learn from it. If I know how to inflect the majority of Bulgarian nouns it is not because I have listened to thousands of hours of Bulgarian or read 10.000 pages (I haven't) - it's because I have looked on some tables (and worked with them to produce my own summaries in the form of green sheets), and because of that I now know how to interpret the things I meet in my Bulgarian study texts.

Indeed. The central problem of an adult language learner is how to start the entire process. You can't just watch TV and hope to learn Mandarin from scratch in any sort of timely fashion, because it's just a wall of incomprehensible input. Children have the benefit of parents who patiently repeat "Please put on your pants" and "No, we do not put peas on the dog" thousands of times. (It's nature's own Anki deck!) And so for adults, it can certainly be practical to memorize a bunch of words and a bunch of grammatical rules, and use that as a starting point.

But those methods will not ultimately allow you to learn the 1,800 pages of grammar that native speakers and even advanced students know. (If only because nobody actually teaches most of those rules.) At some point, you can start reading freely, and listening to people speak. And then you'll start to pick up on all sorts of subtle patterns via sheer exposure.

Now, personally I am quite happy to acquire much of my grammar from a Subs2SRS deck and grammatical overview printed on a laminated placemat. But that's not the only method that works to start the process!

So to revert to Krashen: I have adopted his formulation about comprehensible language, but rejected his way of using it (and his distrust of formal studies in particular).

My take on Krashen is that he's a man with one extremely good idea, and a gift for promoting it. Large amounts of comprehensible input really do help students to internalize a language, and many important rules are learned by sheer exposure. He's far from the first person to notice this—Alphonse Chérel certainly had some similar notion in mind when he drew up Assimil in 1929. And judging from the few accounts I've seen of language students before 1900, even the most brutal teachers of classical Greek who used the grammar-translation method still tended to assign massive amounts of translation. They might have used "intensive" methods, but they certainly used "extensive" quantities of texts.

But Krashen took his admittedly valuable idea, and he promoted it to the exclusion of all else. He overlooked the role that practicing output plays in teaching most people to speak. He cast aside many commonly-used tools that have long helped students gain that initial foothold.

None of this particularly bothers me, but that's because I have a personal soft-spot for people with one very good idea. Even when they're ultimately wrong about many things, they can still contribute to better theories.

[Cainntear]

In mathematics there is an expectation that everything sticks together - either proof is valid in its entirety or it isn't. Not so in linguistics (although Chomsky probably hoped so), and definitely not in language pedagogics. The nearest thing to a provable claim is a grammatical rule, but as Chomsky himself allowed any native speaker could in principle invalidate even the nicest rule by denying that its results are grammatical even though all his neighbours claim that they are perfectly OK. There is a reason that all major translating system now are based on statistics. This doesn't invalidate the attempt to create a comprehensive collection of grammatical rules and write them down in a grammar book, but the role of such a grammar book is mostly to summarize the linguistical behaviour of an unruly bunch of speakers in a pedagogical way. And that's one good reason to distrust any attempt to construct a contextfree grammar, shimmering above the ugly world like a Platonic idea. On the other hand there is a clear tendency for order to appear from chaos, and that's why most words are inflected according to a limited set of rules. But some amount of chaos will always cling to it.

Next step: once clever grammarians have summarized a set of empirically based rules it is totally absurd not to learn from it.

Agreed.

It is paradoxical to me that people often argue that because grammatical rules are never explicitly complete, they are useless.

If I learn from input, I am building my own grammar from the ground up, and I revise and update it over time. My internal grammar is therefore far from complete and accurate. I can fill in the gaps and correct errors over time, and improve my internal grammar. So why shouldn't I start by constructing an internal grammar that is a reasonable approximation of the fuzzy shared model of a majority of native speakers? It seems to me that that gives me a headstart.

I actually wonder if a lot of this comes from the tendency of certain learners to attempt to "correct" native speakers because they don't work to the rules in the learner's grammar book.

Really, I think it's only a simple change of mindset needed. The rules aren't law; they're a framework to learn the language from. And where a rule is broken, that often doesn't disprove the rule, but gives the construction extra meaning.