An alternative take on Krashen

[Le Baron]

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.

Well I thought it was rather pertinent and relevant, because it was being used to imply the theories thereby lack academic rigour. I didn't pursue it merely from boredom.

[emk]

Well I thought it was rather pertinent and relevant, because it was being used to imply the theories thereby lack academic rigour. I didn't pursue it merely from boredom.

Yeah, there were some interesting and relevant points in that sub-thread! But it was starting to drift off topic, and get a bit more personal. So I would appreciate it (as an admin and a moderator) if we let that particular back-and-forth peter out, so that people could focus more on Krashen's theories themselves. Thank you!

[Cainntear]

If I understand correctly, studying grammar in this way is considered learning, but not acquisition in the terminology of Krashen's publications.

This distinction makes little sense, though. Do we talk about "acquiring" how to walk, or "learning"? Nobody gave us conscious instruction. Is it an error that we teach children how to tie their children shoelaces [goddammit!] with direct instruction? Should they be left to "acquire" that skill? And for that matter, do we not talk about children "learning" how to talk? (Admittedly, we'll more often talk about when they "start talking", but we do use the term "learn".)

By making a distinction that doesn't match with the colloquial meaning of the words, Krashen invented a new jargon -- jargon that has been roundly rejected by the language learning community that a huge number of authors feel obliged to include a sentence rejecting Krashen's distinction and saying they use the two terms interchangeably. My go-to citation in essays was Lourdes Ortega's book Understanding Second Language Acquisition "although in the early 1980s there was an attempt at distinguishing between the two terms, in contemporary SLA terminology no such distinctionis typically upheld." (2009, p5)

The fact is that Krashen was making a distinction that others don't, and by putting words on it, he's reified the thing that people think there's a genuine difference there.

As I've often said, people who do well in L1 only classes light on rules can normally describe the rules. If Krashen's distinction held, that would mean that people who "acquire" best also "learn" the most, and the people who "learn" the least also "acquire" the worst.
This means that the two things are interlinked and not independent, which is completely contrary to Krashen's hypothesis.
I do not know for sure that this notion of successful learners being able to explain rules has been widely studied and has been statistically proven -- I may be exhibiting confirmation bias because I already believed it, after all -- but I have an image in my head of something in the university library in typewritten print from the 1980s which commented on using conscious knowledge of language as a measure because they had verified this as a valid proxy measure of language skill. (Krashen's thinking was particularly influential in the 80s, so there were lots of teachers exchewing explicit grammar instruction then. It's a pretty modern recasting of Krashen that says his views were rejected by the establishment rather than accepting that they were seized on enthusiastically by many... and then ditched because they weren't really that effective.)

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.

That's what Krashen said.

Now I can't give you figures to give a definitive answer, but I think this argument is common-sensical enough to take as a sine qua non, so I reckon it's not for me to prove, but him to disprove....

In German, the verb "willen" means "to want" -- ich will = I want.

I believe that knowing this means that it will take very few encounters with the word for you to internalise the meaning. But if you were to just go into massive input blindly, you'd have L1 interference from the English word "will", and you would need far more exposure to it to internalise the meaning.

Two things I anticipate:

(1) people will say that's an extreme example, as there's clear L1 interference... but it doesn't undermine the key point. For one thing, there are lots of languages where there are false friends, so a rule that only holds in the absence of false friends isn't a universal rule... and of course English speakers are far more likely to learn something like French, Spanish or German where such things happen. For another, the false friend thing is just the most concrete example you have of generic "error" stuff, and also the most controlled -- there's lots of things that can go wrong in someone's thinking to make an error.

(2) Krashen gave himself a get-out clause for all the things he effectively says doesn't work, because his framework accepts anything that "makes the input comprehensible". I've made German more comprehensible, so the rule is good. But we've tried teaching rules and rules don't work. Except when they make input comprehensible. So how have they not worked? Because they do not/have not made input more comprehensible? But they do make input more comprehensible -- it's easily proven!

So while he might be right that there's a theoretical upper limit given by the amount of input, the amount of input needed to "acquire" a particular language feature depends on what you're doing to learn it.

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.

Which is where his logic gets really tortured.

Grammar is limited use because it only teaches the monitor.

Comprehensible input is the only important thing.

A good monitor can make input more comprehensible.

And the monitor relies on grammar knowledge.

So why is grammar knowledge not a very powerful goal?

[Cainntear]

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.

Well I thought it was rather pertinent and relevant, because it was being used to imply the theories thereby lack academic rigour. I didn't pursue it merely from boredom.

So you thought it pertinent and relevant to repeatedly insinuate I was deliberately lying in order to smear someone?

You thought it pertinent and relevant to insinuate that my explicit statements to the contrary were just further proof that I was engaging in some kind of propagandistic stuff?

You thought it was pertinent and relevant that when I was tried to show you what it feels like when people are smearing you with clear insinuations that you're lying online, you called me out for "gaslighting" you and when I said that was deliberate you add to the insinuations by talking about "traps", when I was not trying to trap you into anything, but to show you the effects of what you are doing?

And when emk jumped in to try to stop us dragging this thread off-topic, I chose not to respond to your increasingly intense smears, and just go back on-topic.


So... when you say that you "didn't pursue it merely from boredom", slagging dragging the thread back into implicit smears of me.

I mean, honestly...

[Cainntear]

PS...

It is the process of interpreting someone's statements and in this case someone whose statements with which I am somewhat more familiar than a one-time encounter.

If you're presenting our frequent arguments on this forum as proof that you are qualified to make insinuations about me... well, I'm involved in those disputes too, so should I be presenting myself as an authority on your behaviour?

Neither of us knows the other.

[emk]

As I've often said, people who do well in L1 only classes light on rules can normally describe the rules.

I obey hundreds of weird rules of English grammar that I've never thought about for even a minute. And if I did try to describe those rules, I would need to create a set of "diagnostic frames" (URL) and mess around with them for a while. For example, I don't consciously know the rules governing English adjective order. In the diagnostic frame "the ___ old ___ house", I can put "big" in the first blank, and "red" in the second blank. But the other way around sounds weird, or at least heavily "marked"? Almost any ESL student knows the official rules of adjective order better than I do. Nobody ever taught me those rules. But I obey those rules, and hundreds of others like them, completely automatically.

This is what "acquisition" is trying to point at. Alternatively, you could talk about "procedural" knowledge of language as opposed to "declarative" knowledge.

And it is absolutely possible to learn rich grammatical knowledge without ever being able to explain the rules. And past a certain point, we pretty much need to, because some of the rules that everyone follows are only written down in obscure linguistics papers that nobody reads.

This isn't to say that explicit grammar study is useless! It can help almost every student some, and it helps many students of foreign languages a lot. I'm only arguing that formal grammar study is not the whole story.

[tastyonions]

If I understand correctly, studying grammar in this way is considered learning, but not acquisition in the terminology of Krashen's publications.

This distinction makes little sense, though. Do we talk about "acquiring" how to walk, or "learning"? Nobody gave us conscious instruction. Is it an error that we teach children how to tie their children with direct instruction? Should they be left to "acquire" that skill? And for that matter, do we not talk about children "learning" how to talk? (Admittedly, we'll more often talk about when they "start talking", but we do use the term "learn".)

By making a distinction that doesn't match with the colloquial meaning of the words, Krashen invented a new jargon -- jargon that has been roundly rejected by the language learning community that a huge number of authors feel obliged to include a sentence rejecting Krashen's distinction and saying they use the two terms interchangeably. My go-to citation in essays was Lourdes Ortega's book Understanding Second Language Acquisition "although in the early 1980s there was an attempt at distinguishing between the two terms, in contemporary SLA terminology no such distinctionis typically upheld." (2009, p5)

The fact is that Krashen was making a distinction that others don't, and by putting words on it, he's reified the thing that people think there's a genuine difference there.

Great post, Cainntear.

I like to think of explicit grammar instruction as a kind of "force multiplier" when it comes to rendering input more comprehensible. To use an example I've brought up many times when this topic comes up, I could listen to or read German for who knows how many hundreds of hours before I figured out that it has three different classes (genders) of nouns and four cases, or I could simply take a few hours to learn that explicitly and go over some well-chosen examples that would help me spot them in the wild and apply them myself. Why forgo the latter method in favor of some "natural learning" ideology?

[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.

So I would appreciate it (as an admin and a moderator) if we let that particular back-and-forth peter out, so that people could focus more on Krashen's theories themselves.

...

If you're presenting our frequent arguments on this forum as proof that you are qualified to make insinuations about me... well, I'm involved in those disputes too, so should I be presenting myself as an authority on your behaviour?

Neither of us knows the other.

Please, this whole particular back and forth has gotten personal, and I'd like people to drop it. Let's focus on discussing Krashen's theories. Thank you.

[Cainntear]

As I've often said, people who do well in L1 only classes light on rules can normally describe the rules.

I obey hundreds of weird rules of English grammar that I've never thought about for even a minute. And if I did try to describe those rules, I would need to create a set of "diagnostic frames" (URL) and mess around with them for a while. For example, I don't consciously know the rules governing English adjective order. In the diagnostic frame "the ___ old ___ house", I can put "big" in the first blank, and "red" in the second blank. But the other way around sounds weird, or at least heavily "marked"? Almost any ESL student knows the official rules of adjective order better than I do. Nobody ever taught me those rules. But I obey those rules, and hundreds of others like them, completely automatically.


This is what "acquisition" is trying to point at.

Indeed, and that's undeniable, but it's Krashen's starting point -- SLA should be like first language acquisition.

But that's not how the brain works, and we increasingly know it. The "critical period hypothesis" was controversial because it basically said that you couldn't master a language after a certain point in your life, and there were plenty of people who stood as counter-evidence, but people took it, evolved and built on it, and morphed itinto something more useful -- the critical period isn't about language acquisition in general, but about native language acquisition.

The "critical period" seems to relate to fundamental changes in cognitive development, so there's very good experimental and theoretical data to suggest that language learning is significantly different for adults than it is for children, so Krashen's theories were built on an assumption that is now known to be untrue.

I should maybe have been more explicit then: people who learn languages during or after adolescence can usually explain the rules.
Alternatively, you could talk about "procedural" knowledge of language as opposed to "declarative" knowledge.

And it is absolutely possible to learn rich grammatical knowledge without ever being able to explain the rules. And past a certain point, we pretty much need to, because some of the rules that everyone follows are only written down in obscure linguistics papers that nobody reads.[/quote]
Ah, but can you learn rich grammatical knowledge without being able to explain the basic rules?

This isn't to say that explicit grammar study is useless! It can help almost every student some, and it helps many students of foreign languages a lot. I'm only arguing that formal grammar study is not the whole story.

And if that was all that Krashen argued, I wouldn't have any problem with him. I just think he's throwing the baby out with the bathwater[*].
[*Note for non-natives: this is an English expression used to describe when you are so focused on a thing that is not needed that in the process of removing it you also get rid of the most important thing.]

This is why I was talking about "rich grammatical knowledge" vs "basic rules". I feel that if everyone who successfully learns a language as a teen or adult can give you a rough explanation of something, that's a rule that's worth teaching. If there are things they can do but can't describe, that might not be worth teaching. Note that I'm not saying it's definitely not worth teaching -- there are rules that I used to know declaratively that I've forgotten, but still match with what I do when I'm speaking, and I've no way of knowing for certain whether or not the explicit rule helped my learn the implicit rule/pattern.

As for adjective order, I'm not sure how much I even looked at deliberatively detailing the ordering in various languages. But I always started with an approximation of "whatever is most intrinsic to the nature of the head noun goes nearest to it, and in some languages I looked at formal lists in order to determine what speakers of that language considered the most intrinsic properties, and in others I simply kept an eye out for clues and built it up that way. Either way, I was starting with a simple rule and going from there. I couldn't tell you the specific adjective
ordering rules of any language without coming up with examples -- that goes for my native English as much as any of my non-native languages. And I know I looked at the ordering rule in English when I was studying English grammar.

[emk]

But that's not how the brain works, and we increasingly know it. The "critical period hypothesis" was controversial because it basically said that you couldn't master a language after a certain point in your life, and there were plenty of people who stood as counter-evidence, but people took it, evolved and built on it, and morphed itinto something more useful -- the critical period isn't about language acquisition in general, but about native language acquisition.

What is the current status of the "critical period" hypothesis? I last looked at it 10 years ago, and back then, my understanding was that:

1. There was extremely clear evidence of critical period for accents, which started closing around 6 and was closed for virtually everyone by 12.
2. There were small but convincing differences between native and near-native performance with certain kinds of grammar rules. For example, even very strong non-native speakers of French with decades of practice tended to make a tiny number of gender agreement errors that didn't appear in native speech. This only seemed to apply to certain types of grammar rules, as far as I could tell.
3. For most other aspects of language, there was no clear evidence of a critical period.

Have there been any new developments in critical period research in the last 10 years?

Personally, I know a number of non-native speakers who moved to the US as post-docs in their mid-20s. In the case I know the best, they had maybe B2 conversational skills when they moved here, with frequent errors and odd word choice. Today, after decades of using English professionally, they have near-native English with vanishingly rare errors. And I know that they didn't do any English study during that time period—this improvement was organic. Near-native speakers often seem to be created by a process that looks a lot like childhood language acquisition. And it works best for voracious readers.

Also—and this is clearly subjective—I do a bunch of things in colloquial French that I never learned "declaratively" and that I've never really tried to explain. I know how it should sound, and saying it differently sounds a bit weird. My judgement isn't nearly as good as a native speaker's, of course. (They have the advantage of a few hundred million words more input, plus most of them spent 13-20 years in school, and that actually counts for a lot!) But I do have procedural knowledge of French that I can't necessarily explain declaratively.

If I had make a guess, I'd say that second language learning from B2 through near-native levels is actually very similar to first language learning. It's not identical—even C1 students can benefit from explicit nudges about grammar—but I think the large majority of knowledge at those levels is often acquired as procedural knowledge

I also think that it's possible to rely heavily on input even at lower levels, if someone is sufficiently determined to do so, and if they have some way to make input artificially comprehensible. But this may vary a lot between individuals. Some people have a good eye and ear for patterns. Even if they never try to explain those patterns in detail, they at least notice something interesting is happening. (The "noticing" hypothesis.)