(1) LangFest17: Stephen Krashen Polyglots and the Comprehension Hypothesis 2
[Music] a friend of Lang fest one of the advisers to introduce our second part of the prodigy of the professor we have mr. question and we ask mr. Kaufman from link to introduce our next three our next presenter mr. Kaufman good evening ladies and gentlemen is this on can you hear me no hello is it on yes
okay ladies and gentlemen I am very happy to be here and have the opportunity to interview introduce my friend dr. stephen krashen I was at the Boston annual convention of the teachers of foreign languages in the United States which is the largest language convention anywhere and they had all kinds of speakers fascinating fabulous
speakers there was only one event which you had to line up outside to get in people were sitting in the aisles it was packed to the gills that was the presentation by dr. crashing we are very lucky to have here a person that I consider the the clearest and most to the point explainer of how lack language
acquisition takes place he understands it he explains it with clarity and I'm looking forward as I'm sure you are to the presentation dr. Carson thank see [Music] and yes I will be discussing Steve Kaufman in my talk you have an outline yes everybody got one if you don't too bad no we have more in case in case you<span class="mceAudioTime">[:] need them okay I want to start out by letting you know what our latest breakthrough is in the scientific laboratories of Southern California we have done a great deal of research on this interviewed millions of people and we now know the quest to the answer to the question everybody asks what is the first sentence you should know in
another language any ideas okay are you ready will Pena way fool my friend will pay those set of aces what if I've ordered me amigo oh my god okay that's the opening joke let me tell you what's on the handout they hand out at the top is to save you money after it says my name there's my website WWE can calm D is my middle name David all the articles I could put up on there I'm putting them up as fast as I can are there if you want to download them don't ask me just do it [Music] weddings Bar Mitzvahs birthdays you can share it with anyone except Donald Trump which brings me to my next point my next point is Twitter I just spelled my name here yes yes crashing should say I love Twitter I like Twitter and Facebook Twitter and Facebook are the underground this is how we're getting information around these days the professional journals are expensive boring and hopeless they have changed this is why I have the website a lot of us are doingspan> this articles I and get ready to applaud me on this okay articles I publish are all in open access three journals okay more and more of us are doing this same thing with books nobody can afford them anymore so I'm putting them there and we announce these things on Twitter of my work other people's work jokes etc my goal you've got to help me with Twitter please follow me on Twitter I want to catch up to Justin Bieber he's up to like 25 million he's not in first place do you know who's in first place Katy Perry the rate I'm going I'm gonna catch up to him in exactly two thousand eight hundred and ten years I'm taking folic acid and other vitamins so I'm kind of optimistic this is going to happen also today's handout is also available in expanded form and you can look at it right now if you have a cell phone or a little computer with you go to s crashing blog spot.com and I think like the third thing along there is wine fest and as today's handout in great detail or print it out later and you get all the references handouts and the many many quotes I'm going to go through the blocks about is where I put letters to the editor etc going back on Twitter I've been trying to answer Trump and Betsy DeVos every single day they are our new President as you museum probably have heard and Secretary of Education my goal there is to be blocked by mr. Trump it hasn't happened yet the first day I did it first day he was in office he says we've got to we've got to get rid of evil from the United States and I answered and said we're looking forward to your impeachment I agree what I'm going to do today is of course talk about polyglots and related to theory language acquisition theory case histories in other words case histories are one of many ways we do research on this we also do experimental research we do correlational research I'm going to focus on case histories today and the case histories the main point is they are terrific for doing research they're not anecdotes they're real research if you do a lot of them here's how science works you have a hypothesis I'll give you an example of a hypothesis and linguistic hypothesis let's say I have a hypothesis that all languages in the world have pronouns okay that's pretty good hypothesis right when you agree say yes yes okay yes sir okay so I've now looked at two thousand seven hundred and fifty three languages all the languages in the world and they all have pronouns can I claim that the hypothesis has been proven no this is the way science works someone can always say well maybe t [:] hey're couple you haven't seen maybe there's some languages that have been lost like proto Carthaginian maybe it didn't have pronouns maybe a new language will develop and it won't have pronouns so you can't look at every case this is true science is a dangerous game let's say I've made my career on pronouns Iass="mceAudioTime">[:][:]span> published papers and when I go to conferences people say there goes the pronoun man and I've got you know my chair and pronouns ation the Institute of pronouns and then it happens some punk graduate student goes to South America and finds a language for speakers all over the age of 94 no pronouns what happens to my hypothesis disproven one counterexample is enough to disprove a hypothesis what happens to my career how could he have been so stupid right when Einstein first published his theory of relativity a book was published called one dr. Kagan Einstein 100 against Einstein 100 mediocre German physicists all wrote articles saying Einstein was wrong when
Einstein was asked about this book this is 100 people say you're wrong what do you say he said if it were true one would be enough just absolutely the way it does this is how we're doing cases strees if we look at case histories and I have a hypothesis and I'm using it to test the hypothesis every single case history must be consistent with the hypothesis so I'm really asking for trouble I'm asking for people to come up with counter examples and if you do the theory is dead the entire theory is dead 40 years of research waste of time this is the way we work tightrope well let's go through it what are the hypotheses we are now let me summarize the last 40 years of work by talking about we'll call a 40 years war there has been a war going on for the last 40 years between two hypotheses two views of the way we acquire language and develop literacy and it's a very good war because no matter which hypothesis wins we have learned a great deal the hypothesis all in your handout so I'm just doing this for my own benefit the hypothesis I think is right is the comprehension hypothesis and the comprehension hypothesis says we acquire language and we develop literacy in one way and only one way when we understand messages when we understand what people tell us or what we understand what we read we call this comprehensible input here's a crucial point if you want to acquire language with comprehensible input first you get comprehensible input you hear interesting stories you have interesting conversations you read books the result of this are the so called skills grammar vocabulary etc so the causality goes in this direction the rival hypothesis we call it skill building says the causality goes in the other direction first you learn your skills consciously you learn grammatical rules so you do conscious learning first a vocabulary grammar then you practice the new rules in output you"mceAudioTime">[:] produce them and the idea is if you do that enough over and over gradually it will become automatic the learning will become absorbed and automatized and as you're doing it you should get your errors corrected to make sure you got the rules right so notice the causality I'm putting language use here the causality is reversed a profound difference problem is with skill building that automatic use of language never comes it's a delayed gratification hypothesis work hard someday you'll be able to use the language the gratification never comes in my opinion there is not a single human being on this planet who has ever acquired language this way the research backs up comprehensible input I'm gonna give you just part of it today the rest of the researcher comparison of methods methods based on comprehensible input are far you know are always never worse than skill-building and nearly always better with correlational studies etc so the research supports this one comprehensible input also comprehensible input is a lot more fun in fact if input is not interesting no one's going to pay attention to it so it has to be reasonably pleasant for it to work skill building is painful for most people it is painful my estimate and I'll give you some data is that ninety to ninety four five percent of students in skill building classes hate it about five percent liked it I found a study done here in Canada fact where they found that if you guys ask students of both French and English as a foreign language how many of you really really like grammar about five percent those are the ones who become
language teachers you see the problem so comprehensible input is win-win in my opinion it's pleasant and it works skill building is lose-lose it isn't very pleasant and it doesn't work the problem is for the public and this includes language professionals for most people skill building is not a hypothesis it's an axiom they haven't heard of any other alternative it's the only game in town now if you believe in skill building all the ways that we torture students in school all the tests that we give the homework the drills make perfect sense but that's not the way it works okay this is the big war basically the view of grammar is very different in the two ways as I've mentioned in skill building grammar is the cause you study the grammar rules practice them over and over again until they become automatic for comprehensible input grammar has a very different function I want to give you the punchline before I go any further here I'm not about to say that grammar is terrible I will never say<span class="mceAudioTime">[:] to teachers teach grammar go to jail I my punchline is it's limited it's hard to do I'm not saying it's wrong I'm not saying it's bad crashing says don't ever teach grammar no not true here's how we think it works our fluency in language comes from what we've acquired and a great deal of our [:] accuracy most of our hackers so acquisition is responsible for coming out with a sentence in another language the easy way to get the feeling for this this is an easy example for you guys what a great audience think about one of your many languages that you're kind of low intermediate in you've all got one="mceAudioTime">[:] right okay Greek right okay where you can kind of get through a conversation but they're things you don't understand etc so you're having a conversation in Greek you're about to say something the sentence pops into your mind from what you've acquired all the grammar rules do really only one thing for you they act as a monitor or an editor so here's how it works you're about to say something in your intermediate language just before you say it you scanned the sentence internally you think of the rules that you studied and you make corrections or you blurt it out you realize you made a mistake and you go back and correct this is what we think is going on now if you/span> want to see the research on this there's a book I highly recommend published in 1981 by me and you can you can get it for free it's free okay it's on my website it's called the title is second language acquisition second language learning the subtitle is the cure for insomnia if you can't sleep I really recommend this book I mean it's fascinating to like the 2% of the population who think this is really interesting stuff okay but there it is so it's long out of print but you can free download it and other other books on the website and that that's where the research comes let me before I tell you more about this let me tell you what my thoughts were in 1975 when it first occurred to me that this is what was going on you can out figure out how old I am I'll tell you I'm 76 but I read at the 80 year old level anyway here's what I thought that 1975 we have acquisition we've learning they do different things acquisition I decided then gives us our fluency and learning gives us our accuracy isn't that nice <span class="mceAudioTime">[:]two components two contributions obviously we want both so we want to include both in classes we want a conversation two days a week grammar two days a week doesn't that sound fair doesn't that sound perfect the truth must be somewhere in the middle it turns out"mceAudioTime">[:] it's wrong since 1975 literally every day the research has been telling me I'm restating what I did before if the action is here with acquisition acquisition gives us acquisition think I'm sorry gives us fluency and accuracy both even for the most for the child it's a hundred percent acquisition for the adult even for the most analytic grammar loving adult it's nearly all acquisition okay I want to tell you how hard it is to use conscious grammar I'm going to give you the research results and you will be appealing to your experiences which is great in order to use the monitor three conditions have to be met and the conditions are daunting condition number one you got to know the rule let me tell you how hard this is take your pen and draw a circle on your sheet about the size of a large coin okay I'll do a little of this with you oh I love chalkboard schists this is great Luddite let's say this circle represents all the rules of English we'll use English as an example because there's been more study of English than of any other language so this is a set and it's a set of old rules let's say we go to the world's greatest sin tactician still no I'm chomping no question and we say professor Chomsky how many rules of English do you know you and your pals well Chomsky knows more about English than anyone who's ever lived okay so but he's kind of modest about this is well we only know fragments okay with only but let's give him a lot of credit let's say Chomsky and his friends know that much about English okay so that's the first one let's do that one second let's say now we've asked professor Chomsky we go to professional grammarians professional grammarians are people who write grammar textbooks they don't know as many rules as Chomsky because Chomsky's out there discovering new rules but they read his stuff and they integrate it into the books so how many rules do they know draw a circle representing please do this with me a circle representing their knowledge give them a lot of credit okay let's go to another group grammar teachers how many rules do the most fanatic grammar loving grammar teachers know they don't know all the rules in the books but they know a lot of them so draw a circle for them the next circle all the rules the best grammar teachers teach they don't know all the rules they don't teach all the rules they know the next circle all the rules the best students understand finally all the rules the best students remember the little circle you've got in the middle is the limit of the conscious grammar for our best for the best students we have in language classes that's a severe constraint and not everyone is that good at it okay that's number one number two you got to have time to apply the rules you got to retrieve that drag it up put it in the sentence etc let's pretend youlass="mceAudioTime">[:] are an intermediate student low intermediate student of English as a foreign language or second language and you have acquired things with this lot you don't know and you're having a conversation and you want to use the rule for the tag question which you have learned but you haven't acquired yet and you want here's what you have to do you're about to come out with a sentence okay John is a boy you want to say John is a boy isn't he okay or Bello is wonderful wasn't she etc okay gosh how am I going to do this let me look at the subject first if it's as if it's a regular now and you change it to a pronoun if it's a pronoun you leave it alone let's look at the verb if it's a regular verb you change it to a helping verb it's helping verb you use that if the regular sense the sense is positive you make the tech negative is negative make positive then you change the word order by the time you do that your conversational partner is gone number three you've got to be what we call focused on form you got to be thinking about correctness the grammar people think that one of the reasons we are here on earth is to constantly monitor our language and know all the grammar rules possible and get corrected there's another problem you know no that's it there's another problem though that we have for many of us me too we like it we like studying grammar I admit I have a PhD in grammar in Chomsky okay I think it's beautiful my idea of a good time find a grammar of a language I don't know see how they do or if they do the subjunctive you know I like your presentation today I just love going through all that stuff it's great you know anyway in fact not only do we like learning it but we like applying it every time I can like in French you know when you make the past participle agree with the direct object when it comes before last shows KJ Pisa every time I get that right I rekindle the victory and of course I expect people around me to applaud they never do is that right yes no no that's not what I meant not what I meant leave the same feeling what we forget is that we are members of a lunatic fringe normal people get their pleasures elsewhere okay I know I'm one of you I understand this there are a couple of important findings I'd like to put in what will help us with the case histories language acquisition is gradual not all at once very good research on this from the University of Illinois guy named Nagy he calls himself Nagy I keep telling him it's Nagy dude anyway Nagy Anderson and Hermann a number of studies published in the reading research quarterly other top-notch journals generally filled with incomprehensible garbage but in this case good stuff they looked at vocabulary development in English as a first language and here's what they found
