NRC Presents: Stephen Krashen on Reading Because You Want To (Part 1)

Subtitles section Play video

Professor Krashen is best known for the comprehension hypothesis, the idea that we acquire language and develop literacy by understanding messages.
He holds a PhD in linguistics from UCLA, but watch out now.
He was the 1977 incline bench press champion of Venice Beach and holds a black belt in taekwondo.
So be careful.
His recent papers can be found, make a note, at www.sdkrashen.com.
Without further ado, Stephen Krashen.
I have to explain about the black belt.
I got the black belt on the basis of the written examination.
I'd like to begin, I know most of you are concerned with reading and younger people, but I'd like to talk about old people for a while.
Things that have been on my mind and a little bit of research I've done in the last few years.
And this will be important for some of you looking around, I'd say in about 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years for some of you.
So keep this information in a file and take it out in about 40, 50 years.
I've been very concerned about aging.
I wonder why.
I don't know, it first happened when I was on a bus and the bus fare was really like a lot of money, but the sign said senior citizens, it was like 50 cents.
Must show ID.
So I took out my driver's license and I took out 50 cents and I was about to give it to the driver, show my license, he just took the money and says, oh no, that's okay.
They should be told no matter how old the person looks, always ask for the ID, right?
You know, here you are, sonny.
I was in the park not too long ago playing with my adorable grandchildren, I'll show you pictures later.
This guy comes up to me and he says, are these your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren?
I still don't know what I should have said.
I'll give you a story that balances it.
I was in the gym in Malibu, California, my daughter was exercising and my job was to take care of the newest grandchild and I was holding my granddaughter.
We were the only ones in the gym until Adam Sandler walked in.
Pretty good, huh?
He came up to me and he said, the best thing you can say to someone my age, he said, is this your child?
I said, no, it's my granddaughter.
You know, he came over, gave me the little masculine punch, good-looking grandpa.
Adam Sandler can do no wrong.
He is my favorite Hollywood person, period.
Maimonides calls this the highest form of charity.
When no one is looking, there's nobody there, he's okay.
Anyway, the part of aging that I'm concerned with is senility, dementia.
Can I still quote Bill Cosby?
I don't know.
Well, I will.
He said, don't worry about dementia when it comes, you won't know.
You can hide your own Easter eggs, you know, et cetera.
But I am concerned about it because it runs in my family, my father's side of the family.
Everybody gets it around the same age.
He got it at this time.
His brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncle, all got it at age 75.
They all got dementia.
And that's pretty close for me.
I want to tell you how old I am.
I like telling people how old I am, you'll see why.
I am 74, but I read at the 80-year-old level, okay?
Uh-huh, little joke.
So, when I have a problem, or I think I'm going to have a problem, what I do about it is I read the research literature and I write an incomprehensible paper.
So that's what I did with dementia.
I wrote a paper about it.
It's on the website, on SDKrashen, www, whatever it is up there, and SDKrashen.com.
And here's what I found.
I looked at three possible ways of delaying dementia.
Number one, be bilingual.
You knew that.
This is research from New York, as a matter of fact, from Ellen Bialystock, and she got a really good write-up in the New York Times, which was good work, Ellen, did a good job with that.
What Ellen and her colleagues found is that people who are bilingual, who grew up speaking two languages and switching back and forth, have better what is called executive control.
Executive control means not losing your place, like, where was I?
You know, you wind up in the kitchen and you don't know how you got there or why you were there.
You forgot because something happened on the way.
Everybody has that problem.
Everybody.
It gets worse as you get older, but if you're bilingual, the decline is much slower.
Not bad.
Number two, read.
People who read, people my age who read a lot, have about the same verbal memory as people in their 30s who don't read as much.
Not bad.
Pleasure reading.
Reading for fun.
Number three, you're going to love this, coffee.
Yes, three cups a day of freshly brewed coffee will significantly delay dementia about the same as these other factors.
People keep asking me about decaf.
I refuse to look at the research.
I'm insulted by decaf.
Decaf for me is like kissing your sister.
I mean, it's okay, but it's not really the same.
The nice thing about this is that you can do all three at once.
Sit down, have a nice cup of coffee, read a book in another language.
The fountain of youth.
If anyone is interested in doing research and getting a grant to do this, I will happily volunteer my services as subject because I can get free latte.
Okay.
That's usually all people remember from my talks when I begin with that, but I'll try for the rest.
As you see on your handout, do you have a handout in front of you?
Yes?
Okay.
If not, too bad.
The last, oh gosh, 35 years, I have been involved in a major war, and it's a war between two hypotheses of two views of how we develop language and how we develop literacy.
The one I think is right is called the comprehension hypothesis.
The comprehension hypothesis says, as you see here, we acquire language and we develop literacy when we understand what people tell us and we understand what we read.
Major point.
If you want to develop literacy and develop language, you get comprehensible input first.
You hear stories, you have conversations, et cetera.
The result of that is what we call the skills, vocabulary, grammar, et cetera, that comes later.
The rival hypothesis called the skill building hypothesis says it is the opposite.
You begin with grammar.
You begin with vocabulary.
You study grammar rules, and you practice them in writing and speaking, and you get your errors corrected, and you memorize vocabulary.
If you practice them enough in output, someday you'll be able to use the language.
This is what we call a delayed gratification hypothesis.
Work hard, and someday in the future, you'll be happy.
The comedian Stephen Wright explained this very well.
He said hard work and discipline pay off someday.
But laziness you can enjoy right now.
Be Buddhist.
Be in the moment.
It's the here and now.
You guys remember this.
Remember the language class you took in school, the French class or the English class or whatever?
You did vocabulary, grammar, and then you practiced it over, and then later on in the advanced class, you actually could have a conversation.
We say no.
Pleasure now.
Hear a story that you like.
Read a book that you like.
Have an interesting conversation.
In other words, the comprehension idea is pleasant.
The skill building idea is painful.
It's painful for 95% of the population.
This is not a research result.
This is my conjecture, that nearly everyone in skill building classes hates them.
The 5% who like skill building become language teachers.
You see what the problem is.
So skill building is lose-lose.
It's painful and it doesn't work.
I don't think there is a single person on this planet who has ever acquired language through skill building.
Whenever you look at a case of someone who's done well in a language or literacy, there has been massive comprehensible input.
No exceptions.
That has to be the cause.
Comprehensible input works study after study after study over the last 40 years, and it's pleasant.
So it's win-win.
Skill building is lose-lose.
The problem is that for the public, the skill building hypothesis is not a hypothesis.
It's an axiom.
For most people, skill building is the only thing that counts.
They don't know any alternative.
If you believe in skill building, all the way that we torture young people in schools makes perfect sense.
All the drills and exercises, all the examinations and all the tests.
But I don't think it's right.
Well, I've caught you up to the past.
Let me come to the present now.
In order for comprehensible input to work, the input has to be interesting.
People have to pay attention to it.
I think now, I suspect now, that it's not just interesting.
The most best input for language acquisition, optimal input is extremely interesting.
The word I've been using is compelling.
Compelling means so interesting that you're not aware of what language it's in.
It's only the message, only the story that counts.
You're in a state of what Chinsek Mahali calls flow.
The world disappears around you.
Your sense of self is diminished.
Your sense of time is diminished.
Only the book, only the story.
You're lost in the book.
I want to show you where I got this idea.
Some of it is from a former student of mine, Christy Lau.
One of the papers we've published on this is about her son.
In the paper, we call him Paul.
His real name is Vincent.
Let me tell you about Vincent.
Christy lives in the San Francisco area.
Both she and her husband and her parents are Cantonese speakers.
Vincent grew up speaking Cantonese and English.
He's very comfortable in both.
When he was a little boy, mommy and daddy had to work real hard.
So they had to hire a babysitter every so often.
The babysitter would come out, turn on the TV to Mandarin cartoons.
Now as you know, Mandarin and Cantonese are not the same language.
People think they're dialects of Chinese.
No, they're different languages.
Just as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese are different languages.
There is some shared vocabulary.
And if you speak Cantonese, you do know a little bit of Mandarin vocabulary.
It will help you a bit.
But it's not enough to make you a speaker of the language.
Well, the cartoons were in Mandarin.
But Vincent had Cantonese vocabulary.
That helped a little.
The babysitter helped, told him what was going on.
And the cartoons, I am a big fan of children's cartoons.
I think they're wonderful.
I still watch SpongeBob.
I think SpongeBob is such a nice guy.
And his friend Patrick Star, the model of a friend.
And Mr. Crab, the Krusty Krab.
Mr. Krab kind of bothers me.
You know, the Krusty Krab, the Krabby Patty is their big seller.
And it's made out of crab meat.
And Mr. Krab is a crab.
Something is very wrong here.
Okay.
Anyway, I like...
Oh, if you'd like to know the best cartoons right now for children, my opinion, I don't know if you ever watched children's cartoons.
By far, the best one is something called Regular Show.
Check it.
Anybody, if you've seen it, check it out, okay?
Anyway, so he was watching these wonderful cartoons.
As he got older, he started watching children's shows on TV.
And they were in Mandarin.
When he was in high school, his dad would bring home two movies every weekend in Mandarin.
In the evenings, the whole family, grandpa, grandma, everybody, would get together and they would watch the news in Mandarin.
Today, Vincent speaks Mandarin.
When company comes over, guests come over, and they're Mandarin speakers, he has no trouble.
They visited Taiwan, they visited Mandarin-speaking areas of China, they've been to Beijing, Shanghai.
And he has no trouble at all.
The important point, Vincent doesn't care about Mandarin, one way or the other.
He never decided, I should learn to speak Putonghua, this is very important, Mandarin, because I am Chinese, it is my heritage, and Hanban says, the cultural agency, we should all learn to speak Mandarin, etc.
He doesn't care.
He's neutral about Mandarin.
He was interested in the stories.
Language acquisition is the result of getting interesting input.
It's the story that counts.
It's a by-product of doing something else.
Vincent, in another case history, taught me something that I didn't really appreciate.
Most people don't care about language.
We are members of a lunatic fringe group.
We think language is really interesting.
We tell kids, you know, you better learn to speak Spanish or French, it's good for you, it'll help you in a career.
They don't care.
You better learn to read and you better increase your vocabulary, it will help you in life.
They don't care.
Motivation to become literate or acquire a language doesn't matter.
What counts is getting interesting stories.
That's what counts.
We have data that the same idea is true in literacy.
Here's a paper by Rosalie Fink published in 1966 in a journal that used to be called the Reading Journal.
Now it's got this horrible title, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
No one's going to read a journal.
Okay, I do.
Anyway, she studied adults.
This is a first language study.
And by the way, I'm using first language and second language data from different places tonight to show you how universal this is.
This isn't just one small thing.
We're all in the same field here.
Anyway, she looked at adults who were very well-educated and highly literate.
Ten out of twelve, ten, I'm sorry, twelve of them all had been diagnosed as dyslexic when they were younger.
Today, as adults, nine had published articles or creative work.
One was a Nobel Laureate.
As you see in the handout, eleven of them learned to read between ages ten and twelve, really late.
One didn't learn to read until the twelfth grade.
I've repeated the next sentence on this handout so you can see it.
As children, each had a passionate personal interest, a burning desire to know more about a discipline that required reading.
All read voraciously, seeking and reading everything they could get their hands on about a single intriguing topic.
None of them were motivated to learn to read.
They were motivated to know more about something.
That's how it happened.
Well, a special case of the comprehension hypothesis, which is our main topic tonight, is the reading hypothesis.
The reading hypothesis says that reading is the source of nearly all of our literacy competence.
It's the source of our reading ability, our ability to write coherently, our writing style, our vocabularies come from reading, most of our spelling ability comes from reading, and of course our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions.
And there's one kind of reading that counts more than any other.
And it's the kind of reading you did last night before you went to sleep.
How many of you read last night before you went to sleep?
Oh, my.
How many of you, like me, read even though it was too late?
This is reading addiction, yes, of course.
The kind of reading that you and I did last night, the kind of reading that you and I do obsessively all the time.
Reading because you want to.
We call it free, voluntary reading.
Free, voluntary reading is, in fact, the source of our literacy knowledge.
That's where it comes from.
It is our most powerful tool in all language education and has been met with disdain since we have started education.
But it's the one thing that counts.
I want to show you some of the research.
I'm going to give you some old research, some new research, etc.
One of my favorite studies from 1983, as you see in your handout, it's called the Fiji Islands Study.
It was published in a journal called the Reading Research Quarterly.
Now, those of you who know the Reading Research know the Reading Research Quarterly.
The Reading Research Quarterly is the number one snob journal in the field.
Most of the articles in this journal are completely incomprehensible, which is why people think it must be the best journal in the field.
Articles, they say, that are written to get published, not written to be read.
Well, this article appeared there, which made me very happy.
It's a second language study.
It was done in the Fiji Islands, and the authors are among the most decorated and respected people in the field.
Warwick Elie, who is our hero, let me tell you.
A retired full professor from New Zealand.
Everybody respects him.
He has been of tremendous service to the field of literacy for decades.
You know, the editor of this, the director of this, the author of this publication.
His colleague, Francis Mangubhai, he was our guest at my university for a week.
It was amazing how much we learned from him.
These are top, top scholars.
So we have top scholars in this top journal.
Done in the Fiji Islands.
In the Fiji Islands, English is taught as a foreign language, EFL, for 30 minutes a week, beginning in kindergarten.
Elie and Mangubhai looked at the children in grades four and five.
One group had the audio-lingual method, which I define as a method that combines everything that's wrong in language teaching combined into one method.
They do absolutely everything backwards.
You know, they force people to talk before they're ready, they correct their mistakes, constant testing, etc.
The second group got reading for pleasure, sustained silent reading.
Here are the books, boys and girls.
Enjoy them for 30 minutes a day.
Isn't that wonderful?
Now, they were already in fourth grade.
They had had English since kindergarten, so the books were reasonably comprehensible.
A third group they called shared book experience.
We know it as big books.
The children are read to from big books.
They can see the stories, and they do self-selected reading.
Here are the gains.
And this is data that should change your life as it changed mine.
Before I show you the data, let me remind you what we've got here.
We've got the number one most conservative journal in the field.
This was not published in the International Communist Party newsletter.
Warwick Elie, Francis Mangubhai, well-respected scholars.
And all the modern up-to-date statistics, etc.
Good experimental design.
Everything the harshest critic would ever ask for.
Standardized tests, etc.
How did it come out?
Well, we expect native speakers to gain 15 months a year on these tests.
Look at the fourth graders.
First year of the project.
The group that started in fourth grade. 6.5 months gained.
Sustained silent reading.
Look at that number. 15 months gained.
Circle it.
This is wonderful.
It wasn't even close.
Big books, 15 months gained.
I'm not making this up.
This is from the reading research quarterly.
Fifth graders.
First year, first month.
Audio-lingual group, first year.
Two and a half months gained.
This is the first year difference.
Two and a half months gained.
Pathetic.
Sustained silent reading.
Modest but respectable.
Nine.
Big books, 15.
The readers were better.
The first, second year of the project, the nine disappeared.
The groups were the same, the two reading groups.
And even farther ahead of the readers.
And as you see, they were better in writing, listening, and grammar.
And the second year, the gains continued.
And were even larger.
Wow.
This should have changed everything.
I think there is no excuse for a university-level researcher not to have seen this study and others like it.
But this is one of many.
Well, let me skip about 200 studies and move to the present.
The next study was just published in our open-access free journal, the International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, ijflt.com.
Beniko Mason and I have been colleagues for about 20 years.
We've been doing lots and lots of research together.
And Beniko lives in Osaka.
She teaches at the local university.
And among her obligations is to teach a beginning ESL class, EFL class, for adults.
The class is based on stories.
And the homework is reading from graded readers.
Very good combination.
And it's a year-long course.
When the course was over, some of her students were so enthusiastic they wanted to continue on a reading program.
And would she help them?
She said, sure.
But under one condition.
I'll help you find books, and we'll keep track.
But I'd like you to keep a log of what books you've read and how long you read.
And please take versions of what's called the TOEIC test, T-O-E-I-C.
The TOEIC test is very well known, especially in Japan, some extent in Taiwan.
It's a standardized test of English, much like the TOEFL test in Japan.
Oh, gosh.
They're crazy about TOEIC.
Companies require a TOEIC score, or they won't hire you.
And you have to increase your TOEIC score a certain amount in order to keep your job.
There's this one guy in Japan who, in my opinion, has no life.
He keeps taking and retaking the TOEIC and gets perfect scores and gets his name in the paper each time.
This is really disturbing, in my opinion.
Anyway, the test is graded from zero to a thousand.
A score of 250 means you're just about ready to start reading on your own.
You're like low intermediate.
You get up to the 900, 950.
It's considered a pretty high level of academic language.
We took her subjects that she had studied.
She had a bunch of case histories and put them all together, seven of them, and we estimated how much reading they had done, how much time they put in, and did a statistical analysis.
Our conclusion, for each hour you read, for fun, and they read different things.
Some of them read moderated readers.
Some of them read detective stories.
One man read Harlequin romances.
Anyway, our conclusion, this was very constant between subjects.
For every hour you read, you gain about a half a point on the TOEIC, which means, if you extrapolate, if you read an hour a day for three years, you will go from low intermediate all the way to the top.
No classes, no study, reading that you choose that you like.
That, I think, is a really good bargain.
Another recent study came from the UK.
I like this one.
There's a group at the University of London.
This is a first language study.
This group has been following people since they were babies and testing them in various ways over the years to get a nice picture of development.
The most recent version is when the subjects were 42 years old.
I assume they have different researchers working on this.
Anyway, they gave these native speakers of English a vocabulary test and questionnaires.
What are the predictors of having a high vocabulary in your own language?
How much reading you do now, at age 42, was an excellent predictor.
Now, here's the big thing.
Controlling for how much reading you did when you were younger didn't matter.
It's the reading you're doing now that counts.
What you did as a child now doesn't matter.
There's still a strong result.
All this stuff we read that kids have to be reading by the time they're 10 or the time they're in third grade or fourth grade or it's all over, nonsense.
You can get better at any age.
This is what this says.
When I'm 42, I'm going to start reading.
This is great.
Fiction counts.
In the United States, we have something called the Common Core, which I regard as the worst thing that has ever happened to education anywhere.
One of my jobs is to warn you about the Common Core.
They have gone into promoting non-fiction, not fiction.
Given the kids are getting too many stories, they need the real stuff.
I will deliberately exaggerate quoting a friend of mine, Susan Ohanian, instead of Charlotte's Web, let's get the Wikipedia entry on spiders and study that.
Not quite that bad, but it's in that direction.
Why are they focusing on non-fiction?
They claim it's better for you.
You'll get a more good technical education.
In reality, my suspicion is that they like non-fiction because it's easier to test.
They make their money on testing.
It's pretty hard to test fiction on standardized tests.
Let's see what the data says.
Fiction counts.
The best predictor of all?
Highbrow fiction.
A very good predictor?
Ordinary fiction.
Not bad.
Both of them were better than non-fiction as predictors.
Reasonably competent fiction is a better predictor than non-fiction of your reading development.
Here's another one.
Reading counts even when you control for parent education, parent occupation, and your own education.
The biggest problem we have in literacy, in education in general, is of course poverty.
Absolutely.
Children of high poverty have practically no access to books.
Of course, they don't read very well.
In the United States, they also don't have medical care.
Everywhere, they have less to eat.
They're more prone to all kinds of stuff.
Lead poisoning, all this.
This study suggests that reading can counter some of the effects of poverty.
It's the amount of reading you do, not your social class.
We'll see more dramatic evidence of this later.
Thank you.