8th Annual ILI Symposium 2017: Stephen Krashen (1)
thank you I'd like to begin by telling you about some research results we have some important breakthroughs from our research laboratories in Southern California we have the answer to the question you've been asking for years if you're gonna learn another language what's the first sentence you should learn any ideas no no no what's your name do you speak English where's the bathroom no no any others we got it how are you clothes not quite we what am I saying where's the coffee that's a good one for me we have the answer we've interviewed thousands of people and we definitely have the answer here it is my friend will pay I can say that in 15 languages now okay let's get serious I want to talk about first another research breakthrough that is a good introduction to the talk today it does not have to do with schools revival and preservation of heritage languages none of those things it and looking around I think it'll be useful for you in about 30 or 40 years you don't need this now but it's gonna be important later so put it in a file okay I'm very concerned with the question of aging getting old I'll tell you what happened okay this started I was getting on this bus and there's a regular fare and a senior fare and they said senior fare you know very cheap show ID so I got on I took out my driver's license and I handed it to the person and he looked at me and he said oh that's okay never mind they should be told no matter how old the person looks always ask for the ID okay here you are something anyway so I've been interested in aging and the thing about aging that has me most interested is dementia senility someone once said don't worry about senility when it comes you won't know all right another person said senility means you can hide your own Easter eggs okay yeah but I'm worried about it because it goes in my family on my father's side on the crashing side everybody on my father's side developed dementia when they were 75 years old my father did his sister's his two sisters and his two brothers everybody got it 75 is the magic age I am now 76 but I read at the 80 year old level so it's okay okay anyway so I you know it hasn't happened yet at least I don't think so but my way of solving my problems dealing with them is to read research so I read all these papers and I write a paper on it I make it complex impossible to understand and I usually publish it in an obscure journal so that's what I did with dementia and my research I came across three findings which I put in the paper number one if you want to avoid dementia be bilingual isn't that nice okay there's a problem that we all have as we get older called executive control executive control means losing your place getting distracted not knowing what you're doing you wind up in the kitchen in the morning and you don't know how you got there right you're on your way to do something else this happens to everybody when we get interrupted as you get older it gets worse and worse and where was I right what was I talking about that anything and in dementia it's very very serious bilinguals do not suffer from this problem anywhere near as much as everybody else this is research done by Ellen Bialystok who comes from the University of York University in Toronto she found that children who grow up bilingual who aren't used to switching languages as they get older are much better on executive control that's pretty good in fact Bialystock had a big article a big interview in The New York Times was very well done so people know about this bilingualism is good for the brain forget delays dementia number two read a lot people my age who read a lot have the same verbal memory as someone in their 30s who doesn't read a lot number three coffee Wow three cups of coffee freshly brewed will delay dementia six seven eight years about the same as the other factors this is research result done by several different laboratories who came to the same conclusion independently coffee how nice thank you name dumbo okay friends forever thank you dear I take back all the things I said about you no that's right gosh how kind I like to Mike went to the doctor three weeks ago from my checkup he told me my blood type was Starbucks I like coffee so strong it wakes up the neighbors oh gosh Johann Sebastian Bach said without coffee I'm like a piece of dried-up goat meat I could pretty much you know relate to that anyway three cups of freshly brewed coffee will significantly delay dementia don't ask me about decaf I refuse to look at the research on decaf I am offended by decaf for me decaf is like kissing your sister I mean it's okay but it's not really there's not really the same thing notice you can do all three of these things at the same time isn't that nice you can sit down have a nice cup of coffee read a book in another language the Fountain of Youth well I tried to spread this idea around dr. bedico mason who's going to be speaking to you in a couple of days we have a mutual friend King Sokcho I talked to yesterday and she's she has a history with us of simply coming up with lots of good ideas all the time all the time so when I came out with this idea about coffee she said why don't you write to Starbucks tell them about it so good you're the reason she thought it was a good idea is that those days Starbucks put these messages on the cups you know like protect the planet resist evil don't bomb North Korea and all that okay all the other things by the way my remarks are politically biased and if you are offended it will get much worse as the day goes on okay I didn't write to mr. Trump this morning I didn't have time but usually I answer him back my first comment on Trump when he first took office he tweeted we must eliminate evil from the United States I wrote and said I agree I'm looking forward to your impeachment anyway [Applause] and the one I've been doing all the time all the time whenever he says anything about taxes and healthcare I write oh I know what you mean take from the needy and give to the greedy you know I want to get that around okay so anyway back to these things kim suk said if you if you send this to Starbucks they might put it on their cups and they might talk about coffee as keeping you young and also maybe we can score some points for our team maybe they talk about reading and languages all right all for free so I sent I sent them a note I said you might
be interested in this they wrote me back another mutual friend of ours Ashley Hastings says their response was a case of corporate dementia they wrote back and said we are not interested in new economic ventures at this time no I said here's the article it's public domain use it as you like anyway still trying to spread the word and that's a good introduction to what we're talking about today drinking coffee talking about reading talking about a whole language acquisition in general what I'd like to do to begin the talk is to give you a brief idea of what we've been doing for the last 40 years oh my goodness okay how do I aim a how do I write things up there in the old days when I was young yeah I want to write these we used to have things called chalkboards do you remember chalkboards they've gone away just like phone booths and tape recorders nobody under 40 knows what they are okay but I use I love I love chalkboards so we're now gonna replicate what a chalkboard could do for a device that probably cost five thousand dollars okay anyway I want to review for you what our work has been for the last 40 years that's been very exciting and our work begins with a crucial distinction vocabulary word and it's on your handout acquisition and learning we think people have two different ways of getting in another language you can learn language you can acquire language and they're very very different things acquisition we sometimes call the natural way and a synonym for acquisition is picking up a language I was in Mexico for a few weeks and I picked up some Spanish that really means you acquired it it's called the natural way it happens subconsciously while it's happening you don't know that it's happening you think you're having a nice conversation you think you're reading a book at the same time you might be acquiring second once you're finished acquiring you're not always aware that anything has happened the knowledge is represented subconsciously in your brain let me give you an example that what happens to you when you hear someone make a mistake in English has this ever happen to you of course okay when you hear someone make a mistake in English can you always tell exactly what rule was broken no of
course not I can't either most of the time I can tell you I'd say about in my case 90 95 percent of the time I could tell you but the other five percent of the time ten percent I have a feeling something was wrong but I can't quite put my finger on it are you familiar with that please say yes yes sir okay that's right okay that's acquisition by the way just so you won't feel bad that you can't tell every time when a rule was broken as I told you I can't either and I have believe it or not a PhD in grammar and I can't always tell what rule was broken we think the ability to subconsciously pick up language is with us our entire lives it never goes away children acquire first language children acquire second language the ability to subconsciously pick up language doesn't disappear it puberty doesn't is appear when you get your ARP card I think you only have to be 21 to get an ARP card okay Oh ARP I gotta tell you what's new anyway it's always there the language acquisition device never shuts off isn't that nice we can always acquire language I'll tell you the story as we go on of a buddy of mine Steve Kaufman who speaks 15 languages Wow and he's the real thing he says he did eight of them between age 61 and 71 Jerry when we get to be 61 we're going to work and it started all these languages again okay do we have this going them yeah what do I do do their work oh my goodness so how do I get rid of it it's a garbage well let's leave that up for all I like that this is true by the way is that mystical or what e to the I pi equals -1 this is amazing ok ah math I love it ok well now I ain't garbage oh ok very good ok so that's the first idea acquisition and learning the second research breakthrough we had turns out to be very very useful we think everybody children adults all acquire the rules of language in a certain order some rules come early some come in the middle some come late for example with English and this this particular example is true of English as a first language and English as a second language this guy the ing marker John is playing the violin that's one of the earliest grammatical markers to come it's early in first language it's early in second language this one the third person singular s he plays baseball that one comes late for children there could be six months to a year between the two for adults the third person singular may never come we have we know people who speak English quite well and they blow that one a couple of amazing interesting facts about this first of all the order
of acquisition doesn't depend on simple too complicated a lot of rules that seem very easy are acquired light a lot of rules have looked very complicated we can't describe them that come early number two you can't change it no matter what this explains a lot of problems we all had in our language classes when we were in school they try to get you to acquire these things early and you just can't do it you have to wait till it's time has come what was it gala wine it'll be ready when it's time has come so and it's not simple to complex you cannot change the rule it's an invariable order a case I really enjoy talking about as a former colleague of mine at USC we worked together in the late 1970s he was my expert on English grammar colleague with the next office his name was Matt Chiba Thani and his native language was Japanese and when he spoke English he had a very slight accent now Matt knew more about grammar than anybody I knew
personally whenever I needed some information about the research rules he knew them all now Matt you batani PhD linguist made mistakes on the third person singular he has known this into his entire life he probably knew more about grammar than anybody in the city of Los Angeles and that shows that knowing the rule consciously doesn't help you do it fluidly we'll come back to that okay you cannot change it it doesn't depend on simple to complex so I know what you're thinking you're thinking the same thing I was thinking in 1975 when I gave this standing-room crowd only speech at a major conference that's because there were only ten chairs in the room and twelve people came I said we know the order of acquisition let's teach along the order early winter turns out that's wrong and I'll tell you why in a few minutes moving on the next hypothesis has to do with how we actually use acquisition and learning when we try to speak another language I think I just sent this to Donald Trump okay here's what we think is going on acquisition and learning do different things for us when you the easy way of thinking about this by the way I'll tell you what this means is to think about what happens to you when you try to speak a language that you don't know very well a language are kind of low intermediate in have you been in this situation just curious how many of you okay for me my intermediate language is Spanish I can have a conversation reasonably comfortable but there's a lot I don't understand sometimes you know I can't find the right word all that stuff it's very interesting to be at the intermediate stage so when I'm speaking Spanish here's what happens the sentence pops into my mind from what I've acquired then if I want to I can pause before I say the sentence think of the rules I learned in school and make corrections so here's learning up here learning acts as a monitor just before you say the sentence do you think of the rules they make corrections sometimes you say it you realize you make a mistake you go back and correct this is a serious research hypothesis we gathered the evidence for this in the nineteen late 1970s and it's all in a book if you want to read the book it is available this is where I hustle my books right it's available for free on my website okay SD crash and dot-com operators are standing by anyway you can download that book the title of the book 1981 second language acquisition and second language learning the subtitle is the cure for insomnia if you can't sleep I recommend my book you'll be unconscious in about five minutes for people like me crazy people like me I think this is so interesting but for normal people I'm not so sure but the research is there let me just rather than go through the research let me tell you what my thoughts were in 1975 before your mother was born okay when my first grandmother okay when I first realized this is what was going on what are the practical implications here's what I decided then we have acquisition we have learning they do different things acquisition I decided then gives us our fluency learning gives us our accuracy isn't that nice two components two contributions obviously we want both we want our students to speak easily and fluently but we also want the grammar to be there it turns out that's wrong it's all wrong what the research has been telling me since 1975 nearly every day the action is here acquisition gives us fluency and accuracy even for the most analytic thinking grammar loving adult it's nearly all acquisition for the child it's a hundred percent let me tell you this no one was more disappointed to discover this than me I told you a few minutes ago I have a PhD in grammar until 1975 grammar was my life I loved grammar I can't tell you how much I loved grammar have you ever opened a good grammar book and look at the verb conjugations I think they're beautiful my idea of a good time is to find a grammar of a language I don't know see how they do the future tense yes when my intellectual hero I didn't know if you've heard of this guy no I'm Tom ski oh yeah okay from 1973 to 1975 I was director of an English as a second language program in New York and I told was at Queens College I told my teachers here are the universals of language teaching explain the rule clearly correct errors that's what I said I wrote several papers saying that they were published in the best most prestigious journals they're all wrong a lot of people think that was my best work anyway you're listening to a convert today and it's the research that's changed my position there's no way out it's acquisition that makes things work it's very very hard to use this monitor I want to tell you how hard it is much harder than we ever thought we have overestimated how much people can handle grammar there are three conditions that have to be met if you want to use grammar and they are daunting conditions very very challenging number one you got to know the rule you gotta know the rule this is really
hard let me give you an example take your pen and draw a circle on your page about the size of a large coin please do this with me let's say this is what mathematics talking this is a set of all the rules of English we English we're going to use English as an example because English has been studied more than any other language we know more about English than any language this is all the rules let's say we go to the world's greatest sin tactician we go visit professor Chomsky himself and we say professor Chomsky how many rules do you know of English now Chomsky knows more about English than anyone alive he knows more about English than anyone who has ever lived that's what his team does they look for universal principles by intensive study of languages but if you ask him how many rules do you know he would say he's very modest we've only discovered fragments but let's give him a lot of credit let's say professor Chomsky and his colleagues know about this many rules of English gives it do a circle inside your circle we call this in math a proper subset this is the number of rules that percentage of rules that Chomsky knows let's say now we go to what we call professional grammarians these are people who read the works of Chomsky study the works of the sin technicians and they write grammar books they don't know as many rules as Chomsky because Chomsky's discovering new rules all the time but these people know a lot of rules draw a circle representing all the rules they know do this yourself give them a lot of credit can you do that draw a circle okay number four let's say we ask grammar teachers the best most dedicated grammar teachers draw a circle representing the number of rules they know now they don't know as many as the grammarians or as Chomsky but they know a lot let's give them credit next all the rules the most dedicated grammar teachers teach see where I'm going they don't teach all the rules they know can't possibly next the number of rules the most hardworking students understand they don't understand all the rules we give them in class next all the rules the best students remember the little dot you have in the middle is the limit of the conscious grammar for our very best students we have overestimated how much people can learn about grammar well the next issue then is if acquisition is more important than learning how do we acquire language how does it happen let me begin the discussion by making an outrageous statement in my opinion we all acquire language the same we all
acquire language the same this is an outrageous statement you should be offended by this statement because those of us in education like to emphasize how our students are different not how they're the same school pushes uniformity and every teacher you run into says this makes life impossible because kids are different they have different interests different abilities they want different things oh great joke Gary mule deer this amazing comedian my wife and I heard him 10 years ago he was fronting warm-up act for Johnny madness we heard Johnny Mathis in Las Vegas tenure oh that's another lecture it was so exciting anyway Gary Miller was the front man he had these great jokes he says my grandpa told me everybody wants something different if everybody wanted the same thing everyone would be after your grandma so we all wonder it nevertheless there are some things we all do the same let me give you some examples digestion we all digest food
the same put in your mouth down your stomach that's how it that's how it works in Africa Asia North America South America everywhere in the world the visual system is the same for everyone in the world it's always the occipital lobe in the back of the brain it's never in the front of the brain it's never in the side of the brain it's never in the elbow and language acquisition is the same and rather just talk about it I'd like to show you I'd like to take just a couple of minutes and do some sample language lessons before I do that though I need your permission is that okay some language lessons do you mind it's okay lots of enthusiasm let me tell you what just happened in case you didn't see the people in the back thought it was a good idea sure way over there yeah okay not much reaction from this table okay what goes through your mind when this expert comes it says language lesson crosses the line of blood in the sand comes down from the podium and comes right up to where your sinning what goes through your mind oh no he's gonna call on me I'm gonna have to say something I'll make a mistake I'll be humiliated come on you're all grown ups and still the idea of a language lesson in public makes you at least a little bit nervous what does this mean in my opinion it means we're doing something fundamentally wrong something fundamentally unnatural the way we teach language it's not your fault if you felt a little anxious I would feel the same way I'm gonna give you the lessons anyway but I'm gonna go back up there sorry to frighten do I know how it is I'm gonna give you two lessons I'll use the language then you have some of you have heard before maybe some of you speaker studied it in school I'll give you two lessons and you can tell me which of the two you like better very short lesson number one the veteran gets unfuckin Deutsche Selina on to eat mercy and follow Sargon dust off my name I know Deutsche is an Isaiah churlish Baja one day he offered us a Allah there feel air fold mid Deutsche Robin Denton what do you think good lesson so far you think if I kept talking like that you'd pick up German how about if I repeated it would that help how about if I said it louder thank you that would be good someone said slow down are there any German speakers here well if they're okay good dear my witnesses that was pretty slow okay there wasn't the problem I know I'll write it on the board I'll write it on the overhead I'll erase every fifth word you guess what the word is a none of those things matter none of those things mean anything here's lesson number two thus is mine and Christine Cirrus hunt yeah Sagan's II yeah yeah good does his mind cough cough first NZ cop via also cop cop is good yeah yeah here is mr. Spock mr. Spock had survived ix I survived Oran 14-0 Sauron okay also mr. Spock yeah sir good Hogan efficiency Olga yeah Hogan fulfil organ eins zwei drei algún it's not really a dry organ yeah nein feel happy no serve I hope I won't first inseam won't know what he'll say that cigarette hiya night cigarette incent niched good if you understood lesson number two not every word but more or less I did everything necessary to teach you German I will now share with you the most important concept I have learned about language the best-kept secret in the profession we acquire language in one way and only one way here it is when we understand it that's it we acquire language when we understand it when we understand what people tell us not how they say it but what they say and when we understand what we read we call this comprehensible input comprehensible input has been the last resort in the language teaching profession we tried everything else we've tried making kids talk grammar instruction group therapy the computer we tried everything else the only thing that counts is comprehensible input let me share with you some mystical amazing facts about language acquisition I just want to see if Donald's certainly back now my goal is with Donald Trump is to be blocked I want to be like Stephen King you increase my street credibility if I got blocked by Donald Trump I'm gonna be good for my career I'm working on it anyway this has been the last resort in the language acquisition okay there it was three amazing facts three amazing mystical facts about language acquisition amazing mystical fact number one language acquisition is not hard work in fact its pleasant all you had to do was watch me make a few silly jokes on the overhead and you acquired a little German and he's waiting for you outside no that's sorry I don't know why I do that anyway so all you had to do is watch me make these jokes did you acquired a little bit to the center so number one it's not difficult number two language acquisition is involuntary like it or not you all just acquired some German there's nothing you can do about it it's over it's too late isn't that wonderful give incomprehensible input you must acquire you have no choice that's the way the brain is made this is an astonishing fact it comes from Chomsky's work I think it applies to language acquisition absolutely everywhere okay that's the comprehension idea let me do one more hypothesis and then we'll have a mini mini mini break I believe in mini breaks I should tell you why I am NOT a morning person the world is divided into morning people at night people did you know that it's about 50/50 I'll show you how many of you were morning people how many of you are night people good notice I asked the night people second so they could kind of get the idea in a little slow night people become addicted to coffee and coffee needs to be regularly recycled so we will have a very short break soon and it will end when the lines in the bathroom are gone it should take about five minutes men if you finish early you know what to do liberate the men's room so we get back to work
