Let's say we discovered that 300 years ago there were a group of teenagers in a village in southern France, I'm making all this up, who wrote to each other, wrote notes all day long, just because they liked it.

Historians would say, oh, this is a very literate group, obviously.

Our kids are doing this.

So something very good might be coming from Facebook, and I don't think it's been properly studied.

It's much too early, I think, to condemn these kinds of things.

They might be very, very important, and they might be pushing us forward very quickly.

Now, does internet reading good or bad?

I think it's good.

Here's why.

Here's a couple of studies for you, way down in the bottom of the page.

The more kids are on the net, the more they read.

Not less, but more.

The more they read print.

A study on the bottom from Netherlands, a small correlation, 0.31 isn't very large, but it's positive.

More use of the internet means more book reading, flipping over the page.

Same thing in Singapore.

More use of the internet meant more newspaper reading, more involvement with the world in Several studies say that more internet use, more reading from the internet, means more literacy development.

It's that reading, the kind of reading they do, really does count.

One study done in the States, they gave computers to young kids, low income, so they didn't have access, and the more they used the computer, the more they were on the net, the better they did in reading.

Not in math, just reading, which showed it was specific to reading, and they were reading more.

The way they set up the study and the statistics they used, it's clear that the reading from the internet was causal.

I've been involved with a colleague in India, Professor Pratibha.

We're virtual friends, as you are with lots of people in the world.

I've been re-examining some data that she has been collecting.

She works in an engineering school, an engineering college, and her students are extremely advanced in English.

They're really good, and they all want to get better in these exams and get their English going, et cetera.

She gave them a very demanding vocabulary test, really hard, and a questionnaire of how much reading they did.

No surprise, the more they read, the better their vocabulary was, good, strong correlation.

Then I divided the questions into two groups, reading from the computer and reading from Both correlate with vocabulary growth, independently.

What this means is reading from the computer, again, really counts.

It's good for you.

How do you like that?

I've been very interested in pushing something we can do right now, free voluntary surfing, which I think is a wonderful way.

It's narrow reading.

It's your own interest following topics you like.

We do it as advanced English users, but I don't know if our students do.

The little bit of data I have, this has not been investigated.

I think it's a wonderful thing to look at.

This was done in Taiwan.

They found that people were using, lots of people using the internet.

Most of them were using it in Chinese only.

Very little in second language.

There's sometimes a reluctance, fear you won't understand.

The cure, interesting topics.

You'll forget what language it's in.

The potential for us as a field, I'm summarizing the positive now.

We can use the computer, oh my.

In terms of beginning English classes, when we want more books, we can do, we call language experience.

Have the children dictate stories to us.

We write them down.

We put them on the computer.

In a day, you can have lots of good stories.

You know, if you teach kids English, and you teach little kids, and each child comes up with a story, 20 kids in the class, I'm fantasizing, 20 kids, okay, you have 20 stories, you know that two or three of them are going to be as good as any professional story.

Within a week, you have a library.

Thanks to the internet, we can share with every English class in the world.

Watch out publishers.

We can have interesting, comprehensible stuff within a day.

We can have 1,000 good stories written by other kids that are interesting, comprehensible, sometimes very, very compelling.

Video, oh my.

I wrote a paper back in the 80s called Narrow Reading.

Then, in the 90s, I wrote a paper called Narrow Listening, and Narrow Listening was you go up to people, and you ask people the same question, like I did this when I was starting out with Spanish.

I'd go up to 10 people, and I'd ask them the same question, Spanish speakers, and I'd say things like, you know, do you like coffee or tea, you know, when I was first starting?

How do you fall asleep at night?

Then, as I got better, it was things like, who is the perfect man?

Who is the perfect woman?

I got all these lists.

I can tell you what the characteristics are.

And as I, you know, I'd listen to them again and again, and they would get more comprehensible, and they were people I knew.

My triumphant experiment with Spanish, I knew this family in Cuernavaca, Mexico, five brothers and one sister.

I knew them all pretty well.

And I asked each sibling to describe the others.

I got an hour of wonderful tape, fairly good gossip about the whole family.

And since I knew them all, I had background on, this was Narrow Listening, I would like to expand this to Narrow Video.

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Everybody's got their iPads, right?

You can have people record for you, send you the video with context.

Here's a map of the world.

Tell me where you grew up.

Tell me where you moved.

Here's some pictures.

Tell me what do you think of this.

Here's a picture of Barack Obama shaking hands with Mitt Romney.

What's going on?

You know, and we can, you know, people, you get 10 people to tell you about that.

So I think the potential is absolutely enormous.

Okay, I'm going to scold you.

You knew this was coming.

I read every abstract, folks.

I read it all in the book, in there, what everybody's putting on.

There are only hints of using technology to spread good stories.

This is so simple.

I think this is where we can make instant progress and make the world an easier, better place immediately.

Kids can go home from class with their little, what is it, iPad, iPod, iHop, whatever, and, you know, see good stories from the day's class and exchange with each other and get tons of comprehensible input backed up with visual.

I think this would be great.

Well, let me now be critical and go after people who I think are misusing the computer and fooling the public.

This is called bogus uses of the computer.

Just because it's technology doesn't mean it's good.

The biggest offender is in every airport in the world, and it's called Rosetta Stone.

How many of you have heard of Rosetta Stone?

Oh, boy.

They have the most amazing advertising budget.

And the advertisements you see on television is you can become a world citizen, you can see the world, and just get our software for $350 marked down from $500, and you can effortlessly and naturally acquire the language.

And they use a lot of my terminology.

You might have noticed, you know, don't learn the language, absorb it.

I'll see my lawyer, okay?

Do this the natural way, the way kids do.

Well, I've actually been blamed for Rosetta Stone.

I have nothing to do with them.

But I've done something no one else has done.

I've looked at all the research.

There actually is research on Rosetta Stone.

First of all, let me tell you about the system.

What it is, is you look at four pictures, you hear a word or a phrase, and you identify which picture matches the word or phrase.

That's it.

That's the whole thing.

It is not compelling.

It's pretty dull.

Now, there have only been two studies of Rosetta Stone, both of which I suspect were funded by Rosetta Stone.

It's ambiguous.

You can find them on Rosetta Stone's website, and neither of them are done by anyone in language education.

One is a professor of sociology at Queens College in New York, and the other is through a consulting firm that sometimes does educational research.

And I have the articles.

You can find them.

They're on the net.

But they don't really mention who funded it.

And they're not published in journals.

They're just on the Rosetta Stone thing.

So that automatically makes you suspicious.

One of them, this guy Vassilinov did it, and another guy, Rockman.

It's Rockman et al., but you don't know who the et al. is.

It's just Rockman et al.

Vassilinov says that it's equivalent to one semester of college Spanish in terms of hours dedicated.

Well, I looked the data, and I found it's true.

It is just about the same.

The time you put in in Rosetta Stone, if you put in like 80 hours, you get the equivalent of a semester of a college Spanish course on an old-fashioned grammar test.

This tells us nothing.

What we have found in our work is that if you have comprehensible input-based methods, they're better than traditional methods if you give people a communicative test.

If you give them a grammar test, they're the same, or comprehensible input is a little better.

They didn't give them a communicative test.

They gave them a grammar test.

In other words, it's about the same as traditional methodology.

They're advertising that this is the best and fastest way to acquire a language.

What we found here is it's no better or worse than a standard grammar class.

Not very impressive.

The students also were tested on an oral test, a very famous oral test pioneered by the Foreign Language Association in the United States, ACFL.

They grow about one level out of 10.

That's stable.

Both studies find this.

No one has correlated the actual level with college classes.

We don't really know what it means, but we do know they make a little bit of progress.

They have limited communicative skill after 55 to 70 hours.

That's it.

Now, this isn't bad, but this isn't enough to claim that you've got this wonderful method that's much better than any other.

One of the two studies claims that the students absolutely loved it.

They gave them questionnaires and like 80, 90 percent, depends on the question, thought it was terrific.

They're enthusiastic.

They'll tell their friends about it.

Well, a study came out in a regular journal, the Journal of ...

What is it?

It's one of your journals, one of the technology journals by Nielsen, Technology and Language.

They discovered, she discovered, they asked people to do Rosetta Stone and do a full course.

Nearly everyone dropped out after 10 hours.

Major reason, it's boring.

That's an independent study.

My conclusions, I wouldn't say it's horrible.

I wouldn't say it's negative.

I wouldn't say it's torture.

We really don't know, but certainly it doesn't live up to these claims that they say in the advertisements.

That's number one, Rosetta Stone.

Another thing that's happening in the United States and because it's happening in the United States, it will be on your breakfast table pretty soon.

In fact, one out of three schools in the United States uses it.

It's called Accelerated Reader.

How many of you have heard of Accelerated Reader?

You will soon know all about it because they're pushing into other countries.

Accelerated Reader is a reading management program.

The program is this.

The child reads a book, types the name of the book into the computer, a quiz pops up, you answer questions based on the content of the book, you get points.

If you get 60% better, you get credit, otherwise you don't, and then you can turn in your points at the end of the year for prizes.

The Accelerated Reader people say, this is great, this is helping kids learn to read, and we have scientific proof that it works.

About three years ago, the Journal of Children's Literature asked me to do a review of Accelerated Reader and I happily accepted.

I love doing these things.

I looked at all the papers.

There were only two published papers in journals.

All the rest was dissertations, I looked at those, files of unpublished studies, or they came from the company, Renaissance Learning, on their website.

I looked at all of them.

I even looked at the papers that came from the company, and I did a huge review.

It's on the website, you can download it.

To tell you what really happened, I have to review for you what Accelerated Reader does.

This is the crucial part.

It has four components.

Number one, if you get the program, you have to have lots of books or it won't work, right?

Number two, you have to give kids time to read.

Accelerated Reader Company was recommending, until recently, an hour a day of reading to prepare for these quizzes.

Number one, books.

Number two, time.

Number three, the tests.

Number four, the prizes.

Based on what I've said so far, which of these four components do we know really work?