Dr. Stephen Krashen: (2) What Choices Have We? Textbook vs Storybook
he allowed me to read comics I think that's how I develop developed my love for English and for reading well I've been pushing we've been pushing the theory a little harder the last few years and I think we've made good progress what we've said is that for language acquisition to happen you need input Grayden you need input that has two characteristics it should be comprehensible and it should be interesting because if it's not interesting no one's gonna pay attention to it this is what we've done at the research part and it's not easy to do in classes let me tell you what the problem is how I describe the problem of language teaching it's very easy to give children input that's comprehensible but not interesting that's called school it's also easy to give children input that's interesting but not comprehensible that's the world outside of school and my colleagues at the University have dedicated their entire careers to providing us with input that is neither comprehensible nor interesting in my opinion well I want to go beyond interesting some cases that have come up recently have convinced me that we want much more than interesting we want very interesting we want compelling I'm gonna give you a couple of cases I want to tell you about my colleague Christie Lau from Hong Kong and some of you know her and if they have know her about her excellent work she and I have just published a paper about a young man in the paper we call him Paul but I'll tell you who he really is he's Vincent Christie's son Vincent is a nice nice guy he's a teenager I know him pretty well he's a good guy and he grew up in San Francisco and a Cantonese speaking family so he's bilingual Cantonese English when Vincent was a little boy a caretaker would come to the house and take care of the kids him and his brother while mommy and daddy were working very nice person she would turn on the TV and what was on television Mandarin cartoons thanks to knowing Cantonese which gives you a little head start and thanks to the vision visual impact of the cartoons in the context and thanks to the very nice caretaker Vincent could understand a lot of the
cartoons and gradually watch more and more then he got into more TV shows then he got into all these series and the swordsman series and then the historical series and then dad started bringing home movies in Mandarin and Vincent and his brother because they got along so well with that grandparents they would
watch the news every night in Mandarin today as a young man teenager Vincent's speaks Mandarin pretty well guests come to the house do you speak Mandarin no problem they've gone to Taiwan they've gone to China and no problem at all he's really good the major point that I get from Vincent Vincent doesn't care about Mandarin he'd profoundly doesn't care he's not proud of it he's not ashamed of it he never tried to learn Mandarin he has no motivation to learn Mandarin he liked the cartoons and the movies and the TV shows what Vincent and similar cases have taught me is something that those of us and include myself in language education have never understood most people don't care about language acquisition most children don't care about becoming literate we tell our kids oh you know you really should read a lot it'll improve your vocabulary you know or you know you should really study hard in English you'll get a better job to tell an eight-year-old kid that they don't care you know they want a skateboard and do these other things but get a good story get a good movie a good TV show etc a good discussion that's when it happens I am now announcing the end of motivation in literacy and in language it doesn't count what counts is compelling comprehensible input and it emerges as a result a very exciting paper was published at one of the professional journals in the United States by a woman named Rosa Lee think a number of years ago she I have it on page two the hand that I really like this case I like it so much I put in the quote she studied people who were very successful adults here's Jonathan just in time okay she looked at adults who were very very successful who had been diagnosed as dyslexic most of them didn't learn to read until they were 9 or 10 years old one of them didn't learn to read till 12th grade they all were very successful had published won won a Nobel Prize here's how they did it this amazing quote 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 trying to get literate none of them were
working hard to overcome dyslexia they were reading in an area that they found interesting that was compelling to them those of you familiar with this area know that I am borrowing heavily from the work of chin Sigma Holly and his work on flow it is exactly the same idea when you're so involved in the task the world disappears around you your sense of self is diminished your sense of time is diminished when you're watching a good movie when I saw Terminator 3 for the fourth time you know and you're completely absorbed that's when language acquisition happens that's when literacy development happens well I want to move on in the time remaining to another hypothesis related to all this this is a stage hypothesis I'm going to claim that we develop the highest levels of literacy and all of you have done this by going through three stages and we all go through these stages the first stage stories lots of stories this happens in second language when you take a really good second language class that's filled with stories and it happens to children in their first language when they hear lots of stories at home and at school stories are much better than formal instruction those you have the time take a look at the charts I have there this is from my colleague si and Lee and her students in Taiwan where they've looked at the structure of stories read to children in classes in Taiwan studying English and they've compared them to the complexity of the textbook no contest the stories are far richer more vocabulary more vocabulary and comprehensible context and in other studies far more grammatical structure stories have far more and more exciting language in it than any textbook so stories is the first stories then gives you the incentive and the competence to do free voluntary reading that's the second stage you hear stories you're exposed to the language the written language the language of books and the books become more comprehensible they also get you excited the teacher reads Charlotte's Web to the class the first two chapters the book disappears from the school library disappears from the bookstores and you know the rest free voluntary reading is stimulated by stories free voluntary reading is a stage successful readers have gone through and it develops the competence to bring you to the third stage heavy tough academic reading specialized reading which could be an academic subject it could be a special trade subject specialized reading free voluntary reading reading for pleasure
is the bridge it's the missing link I want to present to you one case history just to make the point I'll give you a case that I know the best and I invite you to consider your own case I want to tell you a little bit about me and how I went through this my case is a good one to look at because all the conditions are favorable I grew up privileged I cannot give you a compelling story of overcoming hopeless obstacles because that didn't happen in my case at all I grew up upper-middle class in a family that was interesting because of the nearly complete absence of any family pathology my mom and dad loved each other they loved me and my sister we never had arguments my older sister I will never understand her she's always been so nice to me and I don't know why to this day it's the same thing anyway so when I when I was growing up there were books everywhere mom and dad read stories to us my sister it's nice to me if I asked her she probably still would she got me involved with radio programs school lots of books etc then free voluntary reading this was the middle stage for me I went through three stages in free and free voluntary reading starting in middle school the first stage are you listening Jonathan this is for you the first stage was comic books
oh my gosh I spent years reading comic books I was in the low reading group in school and dad felt the answer was comic books and he got me comic books and encouraged me to buy comic books in fact dad gave me an unlimited budget for comic books a round of applause for my father please what a difference that
made in those days I was at a disadvantage in those days because this was the 1940s and 50s and all we had then was Superman Batman and this guy called Captain Marvel it wasn't like today comic books today are much better oh my gosh thanks to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics the introduction of spider-man in 1961 which just changed everything a superhero with problems and today the entire Marvel Universe is had a very powerful positive I think impact on literacy I think Stan Lee has done more for literacy Stan Lee and RL Stein they're the people of them the most for literacy in my opinion anyway after comic books years and years of this and I still haven't recovered the second was sports stories oh my in high school I started reading junior high in high school I started reading sports stories for me it was baseball and I found one author I really liked a guy named John R tunas I discovered that Jim tre lease the author of the read aloud handbook also loved John Artu and he's given me a lot of information about him I didn't know John our tunas wrote these stories I gotta tell you a little about it if you don't speak baseball it's okay this will be comprehensible and a mythical team the Brooklyn Dodgers with different players and the books were in a series it was the same players in each book but as they developed it wasn't only about homeruns it was about the players and their lives in their problems the last one in the series book number 16 I think was called World Series the World Series is the World Cup baseball actually they call it the World Series but it's really the United States and one Canadian team I mean this is arrogance okay I mean come on I apologize the world sir anyway it's the last game each team has won three games and they're in the game that's gonna settle the whole world series it's the last of the ninth inning the end of the game the score is tied three to three bases are loaded two outs the pitcher is the father the batter is the son and they haven't spoken for 15 years that's good writing if you want to find out what happened you're gonna have to read the book yourself after that it was science fiction it was I this was the Golden Age of science fiction it was wonderful arthur c clarke Ray Bradbury Isaac Asimov oh gosh it was absolutely wonderful Robert Heinlein and his early careers till he went crazy in my opinion but it was great stuff and I read all of it this was my curriculum in secondary school this is what made me literate I went to classes I read the assigned novels and all that I took tests I
passed them I have no idea what they were about I don't remember any of them these books I remember nearly everything my career in high school was pretty much the same as my colleague Alfie Kohn who said that in high school he paid attention to everything except the teachers this gave me the literacy to make academic reading more comprehensible when I found out what I liked which was linguistics I used the same principle I read works the first class I'm about eight minutes left okay the first class was syntactic theory and you had to read Chomsky and I tried to read aspects of the theory of syntax and understood nothing it could have been written in Bulgarian I then decided to read the complete works of Chomsky starting at the beginning moving up to the present then I understood it reading Chomsky is how I became literate in academic language I wasn't trying to be to learn academic language I was reading Chomsky because it was compelling and exciting it was just as exciting as the baseball novels I read it because I was interested in the topic the result was academic competence and the ability to write in an academic style and to think like an academic I don't know Chomsky okay we don't hang out and have coffee and go bowling and all that but I met him once I shook hands as I said I'm Steve crash and he said whoo that was it anyway but Chomsky was my teacher I learned from him in all these cases the reading was compelling and in these two cases it was self selected and narrow not broad you find what you like just like the dyslexic and you read deeply well if all this is going to happen to more brief points kids have to have access to books this means the importance of libraries I just want to mention libraries and put in a brief commercial message a subject that has really got me very interested in the last twenty years poor children have no access to
libraries this is one major reason why children of poverty don't read very well the studies have shown overwhelmingly improving library improves literacy not only that a good library will balance the effect of poverty this is a result from our studies so this is where the investment has to come for children of poverty I want to close by sharing with you some extremely disturbing results that are very very new and you are the second group to hear this this is the result of struggle over the last month with me and Elizabeth Lao who's sitting here in them in the middle raise your hand ok so people can ask you questions ok where we have stumbled across some data that is highly relevant to Hong Kong and I think all over the world this is a paper we've just finished and sent off for publication so you're the early early people to learn about this this is about the pearls examination everybody knows about pearls this is an exam given to kids who are 10 years old countries all over the world who just a second who want to who want to be compared to other countries or if the results come out in the newspapers and the newspapers get very excited about who won all right France wants to know if they beat England Korea wants to know if they beat
Japan who came out first in pearls and all this my colleague alfie kohn says the newspaper reports should be published in the sports section of the newspaper that be more relevant well people are very excited about hi pearl scores and I wanna show you some high scores we isolated a group of countries
here that we call baseline countries these are countries that are very high social class very little poverty which means lots of access to books good libraries etc these are connected and what we find in these countries the Pearl scores are high but the people in these countries like to read if you look
at the chart in the middle of the third page parents like to read around anywhere from 33 to 51 percent which is pretty good in comparison to other countries and the children a good third or more the children say they like to read so that's pretty healthy we've also found some countries that we found very peculiar that's in the next chart take a look Hong Kong Taiwan Italy Singapore hi social class very little poverty and the libraries in these countries are pretty good the pearls scores are good but look at the liking reading scores Paran likes to read much lower than in the baseline countries children like to read much lower than the baseline countries our opinion is that the most important statistic is whether the parent likes to read more important than any test score because if we have a country where the parents don't like to read you're not going to get continuing intellectual development it's not going to happen so what is going on in these countries well oh the next table is over all means but let's let me go to the conclusions here here are our conjectures the true path to literacy is free voluntary reading kids who read a lot are going to do fine on these tests because they can't help it kids who read a lot have acquired the academic style they've acquired vocabulary grammar like everyone in this room let's say I asked all of you let's say there are 238 people I have no idea but let's say I asked you all to write something I won't don't worry and then we gave the you what you wrote two people to judge there would be 238 perfectly fine papers there wouldn't be a bad one in the room I promise you because you've read so much you really have no choice okay in fact you didn't even know how to write poorly every time you write something down it's totally correct the only exception is after you've read a pile of student papers which shows the influence of reading right you go to someone's house you see books everywhere you'd be amazed to see a sample of their writing with with poor quality and lots of mistakes so it usually comes the normal ways reading there's another path the other path is test preparation we're calling these countries test prep countries in these countries and the United States is rapidly becoming a test prep country the focus is on high test scores by any means possible test preparation test preparation means giving students strategies of increasing their scores for example when you turn the page on your test make sure you don't turn to pages at once this is a good test prep strategy when you have a reading comprehension passage look at the questions first then go back and look at the passage look at the distractors see which ones you can eliminate that are obviously wrong how to guess okay what this is doing is like raising the temperature raising the thermometer in the room by putting a mat
raising the temperature in the room by putting a match under the thermometer you haven't raised the the actual heat level you've just changed the thermometer or going to a hospital and you want to show that our doctors are great so just before it's time to take the take temperatures you give everyone ice water this is this is what they're doing basically you combine that with lots of reading of very difficult texts what you're gonna have is high test scores but nobody likes to read it is a terrible way for the future and when we do this we get instant gratification but we don't get high scores I'm going to go by me to conclude by going back to my original point we have a choice between doing it the hard way or the easy way and the easy way in this case the pleasant way is the one that works it involves libraries and enormous reading for pleasure my hope is that educational systems will at least accept it as an option and try
it right now we are rushing vigorously in the opposite direction thanks to the leadership of the United States in the common core a wonderful book was published about three years ago a guy named Yong Zhao who's a professor at the University of Oregon who says that China is beginning to see the errors of being test crazy of having testing fever it is moving away gradually from testing testing testing into more creative forms of education the United States is going in the opposite direction they're going to where China used to be and it's because of the Common Core beware of the Common Core it is moving us in the wrong direction and because of the powerful influence of the American economy it will be on your breakfast table very soon thank you very much
