British Council Interviews Stephen Krashen part 2 of 3 - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Refer back to three aspects to come up with.
First of all, and this next one is so marvelous, it's so wonderful, it sets us free in terms of materials and language teaching.
It makes life so much easier.
It says that if you give people enough comprehensible input, all the grammar they are ready to acquire is automatically there in the input.
You don't have to say, well, where is your I plus one today?
Let's aim this.
What's the rule of the day?
You don't have to do that.
Lots of comprehensible input, it's there.
Just like the balanced diet has all the nutrition you need, all the vitamins.
You don't say, well, today I need more vitamin B3, so I think I'll eat this.
No, you have lots of interesting food and all of that takes care of itself.
I have a strong suspicion that this is absolutely true.
You can imagine, we no longer have to have targeted input.
We don't have to aim at specific rules.
This is great.
This is number one.
Number two, very helpful.
For input to work, it has to be two things, comprehensible and interesting.
In fact, you can summarize the problem of language teaching like this.
It's very easy to give people input that's comprehensible but not interesting.
That's school.
It's very easy to give people input that's interesting but not comprehensible.
That's the outside world.
My colleagues at the university devoted their lives to giving us input that is neither comprehensible nor interesting.
Our job is to do both and that's hard.
This is the task of language teaching.
I've done the easy part, me and my colleagues.
The easy part is the theory.
Comprehensible and interesting, fine.
The tough part is how do you make input interesting and comprehensible?
In fact, I'm going to raise the stakes higher.
Not just comprehensible but compelling.
So interesting you forget that it's in another language.
That's the goal.
I got interested in this from the work of a colleague of mine, a former student, Christy Lau.
Christy works in San Francisco and the last few years she has set up and run a very interesting program for children and it's in Mandarin.
It's for children who have come from China or Taiwan and are forgetting their native language and it's for American children who've been in Mandarin immersion programs.
Program is really good.
It's lots of stories and books and full of read-alouds and discussions and interesting things.
But Christy had one child, Jack, who didn't want to be in the program.
He was eight years old and he would much rather be skateboarding, which I think that's reasonable for an eight-year-old just to be with his friends and have a good time.
And no matter what Christy did, he wasn't interested.
He had come with his family from China and his Mandarin was beginning to go away as his English got stronger.
So the last day of school, the last day of the program, Christy said, okay, bye, thanks for trying it.
Here are some books you might enjoy.
And she gave him some story books with pictures, the story of A Fan Ti, which is extremely popular in China for kids.
He loved it.
This is interesting.
She finally found the book he wanted.
In fact, Jack got so interested in A Fan Ti, he asked his mother to read him the stories of A Fan Ti while he did the dishes.
That's how incredibly compelling it was.
He was never interested in Chinese, not interested in Mandarin.
He wasn't for it or against it.
He just didn't care.
But he liked those stories.
And as she read the stories, his Mandarin was improving.
When they ran out of good books, it was over and his Mandarin started to degenerate again.
It's the story that counts.
Normal people, and this does not include us, normal people in the world are not interested in language acquisition.
They're interested in stories.
They're interested in the message.
It has to be compelling.
This is very similar, in fact, I think it's identical to a concept introduced by Mahali I won't spell it for you, called flow.
When you're in a state of flow, only the activity counts.
The world disappears around you.
Your sense of time is altered.
Your sense of self is diminished.
This is what we're looking for.
A good book, a good movie.
Happened to me on Turkish Airlines.
You know, during dinner, I watch a movie.
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.
I didn't know there were all those vampires in American history.
They fought on the side of the Confederates of the South.
I didn't know that.
It's very interesting.
Abraham Lincoln was really something.
You should have seen.
Wow.
I didn't know any of this stuff.
So, this is what happens.
Only the story counts.
This is what we're aiming for.
Two ways of making sure this happens, or encouraging it.
Reading should be self-selected.
And the studies confirm this.
My colleague, Singhee Lee, has done studies on this.
You compare assigned reading with self-selected reading.
Even if you try to get the best possible books, self-selected makes much more progress.
It's much easier to enter into flow.
I don't know about you, but I have a hard time when people give me books as presents.
Do you have that problem?
No matter what, I never want to read them.
Whenever it says on Twitter, must read.
I say, no.
Isn't this amazing?
We have to come to it ourselves.
Self-selected reading is the way to go.
I'm setting you up for some more stuff later.
The second setup is narrow reading.
Self-selected reading is very often narrow.
What we do in classes is we give kids a wide range of things like literature class.
You do the 16th century, 17th century, 18th century.
You do a little poetry.
This makes sure that you never understand anything because you never get into it.
You never get background knowledge, et cetera.
The studies show that good readers are narrow readers.
They stick to one genre at a time, one author at a time, and gradually extend it as they go.
I want to present to you, modestly, a universal plan, a universal sequence worked out with my colleagues and me.
It's about two-thirds down the page.
Page one is called the three-stage model.
This is how I think people get the highest levels of literacy, academic competence in first and second language.
I'm making the claim this is how it always happens, and this is how you did it.
There are three stages.
Stage one, lots and lots of stories, lots of read-alouds, lots of fun.
That gives you enough competence to enter a second stage, where you do lots of free voluntary reading on your own.
For many of us in first language, it happened during high school.
This gives you enough competence to start ...
Fatly, I think this has gone off now.
Hey, high-tech conference, come on.
Marisa, remember yesterday?
This happened to Marisa yesterday, this high-tech thing, and then the computer couldn't get connected.
Ah, you know.
That's why I use handouts.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Where was I?
All right.
The words to the song.
Here I go again.
The third stage is academic reading, and it's the fiction that brought you to that stage.
I'm going to argue that English for special purposes doesn't work.
Sorry.
We may have a good time, but it's not helping our students.
It's all absorbed, it's all acquired.
Through massive amounts of reading, I want to present a case history.
It's interesting.
Chuck, Sandy, in his talk talked about personalizing and revealing yourself.
I never do this, but I'm going to do it now.
I'm going to tell you about me, because it fits the work I'm going to tell you.
I'm going to give you a case history of the development of academic literacy, and I'm going to use my own case, because it's the only one I really know well.
I hope this will be supplemented by other people.
I'm going to claim my case is typical, not unusual, and that you went through the same stages.
The superficial part is going to be the same, little details will be different.
Yes, I was read to as a child, yes, lots of times.
That brought me up to the point where I could read for pleasure.
This started in, I'd say, when I was nine or 10, and it started with comic books.
Of course, the wonderful contribution comic books have made.
My friends and I read lots of comics.
We read Batman, and Superman, and Captain Marvel, and all these things that were popular in the United States.
We were at a disadvantage, because this happened in the 1950s and 1960s, before the silver age of comics, before Marvel comics, before Spider-Man, and Stan Lee, and all the great things, which I find really interesting.
I wish I'd had them when I was a kid.
I could have had a career, done something with my life.
I've been catching up, again, thanks to Turkish Airlines.
I have seen, this is my, I've been using it quite a bit lately.
I have now seen Iron Man 1, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and having seen all those, they allowed me to watch The Avengers, which was really good.
I got to watch these movies.
I go to the movies a lot with my wife, and we see these sensitive movies, which are really good.
You know, Devil Wears Prada.
I sympathized with the Meryl Streep character.
I thought she was right.
I have to adjust my hormones, and see movies where things are blown up a lot.
That really fit the bill.
They're very absorbing.
They're very good.
Anyway, it was comic books.
After comic books, and this lasted several years, and that was our literature.
That's what we read.
That's what we discussed.
I read thousands of comic books, more than one a day over those years.
After that, it was sports books, mostly about American baseball.
I found an author that I really liked, and I'm going to tell you about him, because I've been discussing this with Jim Trelease, the author of a wonderful book called The Read Loud Handbook.
He had the same favorite author when he was in high school.
It was a guy named John R.
Tunis, who wrote like 15 books about baseball, chronicling one baseball team, all fiction, the Brooklyn Dodgers with different characters.
Oh, my gosh.
It wasn't just about home runs.
It was about the players, and their lives, and their frustrations, and conflicts.
How many of you speak baseball?
Understand the game?
Okay, for both of you, let me tell you about the last one in the series.
Here it is.
This is the last one.
It's called World Series.
This is the last John R.
Tunis book.
It's the last game of the championships, the World Series.
It's the last inning.
It's the seventh game.
Each team has won three games.
The winner of this one wins the whole thing.
It's the last.
It's the end part of the game.
It's the ninth inning.
Two outs, bases loaded.
The pitcher is the father.
The batter is the son.
They haven't spoken for 15 years.
That's writing.
If you want to find out what happened, you'll have to read the book.
This was compelling.
So, I read sports stories, and a lot of them, not just John R.
Tunis, but other authors as well.
After that, as I moved on through high school, it became science fiction.
It was science fiction that was popular in those days.
Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.
Clarke.
Those were the people who influenced my thinking.
This was my education as an adolescent.
I read things in school.
I passed tests on them, but I don't remember them.
In fact, it's all a blur.
My literacy education was my private reading.
That was the curriculum.
My colleague in the United States, Alfie Kohn, who's a raving genius in my opinion, he says when he was in high school, he paid attention to everything except the teachers.
Okay, it was pretty well what happened to me too.
It was those books.
Now, those books did not bring me to the highest levels of literacy.
Okay, that's George Bush.
He's angry. Anyway, that was not enough to make me fully literate, but it brought me to the point where real hard stuff was more comprehensible.
Notice at every stage here, at this stage, my reading was narrow and self-selected.
It was gradual all the way through.
I didn't try to read a lot of different things.
College for me was pretty much a disaster, but graduate school was different.
Graduate school, I studied linguistics.
I finally found what I liked.
I discovered early on in studying linguistics that there was one person you had to read, and that was Chomsky, of course.
I decided to do, it was a very lucky project.
I did the required reading for classes, but I had my own reading program in linguistics.
I read the complete works of Chomsky starting at the beginning.
When you do that, you understand.
It was the same thrill as reading science fiction and reading sports stories.
You start at the beginning with Syntactic Structures, 1957.
There's a lot of stuff he doesn't solve that he doesn't know what to do next.
Then you read Current Issues in Linguistic Theory in 1963, and you see he's resolved some of the issues, and new problems come up.
Then you go to Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, and you see this beautiful progression.
It was Chomsky who was my first teacher of academic discourse.
From Chomsky, I learned how to write like a scholar, and I learned how to think like a scholar.
Actually, I don't know Noam Chomsky.
We don't hang out.
We don't go bowling together or anything.
I did meet him once.
I was introduced.
I said, I'm Steve Krashen.
He said, who?
Anyway, but I'm very indebted to this.
Later on, again, this is narrow, self-selected reading that put me in a state of flow.
It was very compelling.
It was right for me.
For very few other people, I know that, but it was right for me.
After that, later on, when I was in my graduate career, I got involved in brain and language.
I actually did my doctoral dissertation, this was in 1907, on the left and the right side of the brain.
I did my dissertation using a technique called dichotic listening.
You have headsets, and you put one signal in one ear.
One ear hears bah, and the other hears gah at the same time.
You ask the person what they heard.
If it's the right ear that wins, it's the left side processing, left ear, right ear.
I discovered doing this, we were doing this stuff, there was one scholar who pioneered the early research and did most of the studies.
Her name was Doreen Kimura.
She was in Western Ontario in Canada.
I did just what I did with Chomsky.
I read her complete works.
Papers in experimental psychology are a lot easier to read than papers in our field.
They're very short.
They get right to the point, which is really nice.
They don't give you the whole, someone said, when someone asks you what time it is, you don't want a history of the wristwatch.
This is what we do in our field, which I think is really unfortunate.
I could read five of her papers in a day with no problem at all, because they were three pages long.
I read all of her work.
I read the work of her colleagues.
I've never met Doreen Kimura, but she was my teacher.
She taught me academic style.
She taught me experimental design.
She taught me how to apply statistics in studies.
Here's the important point.
All this time, I was not trying to develop academic competence.
I wasn't trying to learn to write like a scholar.
I was reading because I wanted the message.
And I subconsciously absorbed, Krashen would call this acquired, all the aspects of academic style.
And it came naturally and easily.
And I suggest this is the only way it happens.
It cannot be taught.
Now with this in mind, let's take a few comments about what the computer can do for us with all this stuff.
In terms of the theory I've just given you in the outline, oh, I found this great quote by Ursula Le Guin.
Did you see it here?
These first two stages are mostly stories.
She says, there have been great societies that never used the wheel, but there have been no societies that didn't use stories.
This is universal.
Well, what about the computer?
I'm going to talk about the good and the bad, as I warned in my abstract.
The good are places where the computer is used in tune with comprehensible input.
And we haven't come close to utilizing what we already have.
We're not going to need anything new.
Just making better use of ordinary stuff that a lot of ninth graders already know how to handle is going to make language teaching much easier and much more fun.
Well, people are worried that kids are now reading from the computer, and they are.
And here's some data for you, just how much are kids reading from the computer.
I got this from a number of reports put out by various foundations on reading.
And if you look at the chart, again, if you're under 25, you can see this on the bottom of the page.
And if you look at book reading over time, this is American teenagers from 1946 to 2010, it's about the same.
Kids are reading about the same.
Contrary to popular opinion, kids are reading about the same in book reading as they did years ago.
Where reading has declined is in magazines and newspapers.
And that's been for all age groups.
Website reading has increased a little dip after 2005, but it's considerable.
And when you add up all this reading, kids these days are reading about as much as they ever have.
A little departure from my message, I've been very interested in the social networking part, as most of you are.
And this is, I'm getting off the topic for a moment, but I think this is extremely interesting.
There's other data on how much kids are using things like Facebook, and as you know, it's a lot.
They're doing it.
And I think the jury is out, whether it's good or bad.
I suspect it's very good.
Here's why.
Kids are reading and writing.
They're not reading Shakespeare.
They're not writing essays on the history of China.
They're talking about themselves.
But it's personal writing, and we know one thing about writing.
Writing makes you smarter.
Writing gives you better insight.
Writing pushes cognitive development.
And my conclusion from all this is that teenagers are reading and writing more today than ever in history, thanks to Facebook.