Krashen Rocks!

Stephen Krashen published Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning in 1981.  In this influential book he made the distinction between acquisition and learning which explains why so many students in France study English in school for seven years and are still unable to communicate in English.  They learned the grammar; they memorized irregular verbs; they decoded literary passages.  They can not tell a tourist how to find the nearest post office. They learned about the language.  They did not acquire it.

My francophone granddaughter, having chosen to study Spanish in school, spent a month in the United States, listening in on conversations and watching Pirates of the Caribbean and High School Musical in English with English subtitles.  Six months later, confronted with two Americans who spoke no French, she spoke to them in beautifully accented English, making very few grammatical errors. She had acquired English without learning it. This may be anecdotal, but it is one of the many reasons why Krashen's hypotheses make sense to me.  They are validated by my own personal experience, which includes forty years of teaching English as a foreign language.

Krashen set out to discover how languages are acquired. He based his conclusions on earlier studies as well as his own research and has never claimed to have invented any methodology. In a nut shell, Krashen affirms that we acquire languages through comprehensible input, that is, through hearing and reading messages that we understand.  This is how mothers teach their children to speak; this is how people like my grandaughter acquire language in an immersion experience.  After hearing a message that is comprehensible because of its context, we acquire that bit of language and are eventually able to produce it and be understood.  We have all watched children acquire language in this manner. Krashen's work inspired Teller to develop "The Natural Approach".  James Asher applied Krashen's hypothesis and came up with what is known as TPR, Total Physical Response.  

(A teacher using TPR gives commands to her students.  Stand up.  Sit down.  Turn around.  As she gives the commands she models them so the students understand what she wants.  After several repetitions she stops modelling and the students respond with the physical action she is asking for.  She is giving them comprehensible input and their actions demonstrate that they are understanding her.  The fact that they are not required to speak but to demonstrate through their actions that they have understood gives the method its name. Berty Segal is the world's champion TPR teacher. ) 

Other teachers tried to apply Krashen's hypotheses to teaching a foreign language in a classroom environment.  It wasn't an easy task, since in a classroom over a period of several years students receive only a few hundred hours of input, instead of the thousands of hours they receive in an immersion experience. The solution, rather obviously, was not to waste those few hours, packing them with 100% comprehensible input, whereas in immersion much of the input is incomprehensible "noise". One of the teachers exploring the possibilities of comprehensible input was Blaine Ray.  He began using TPR to teach Spanish and developed the art of creating stories with his students. Susie Gross, Jason Fritze and many, many others became interested in his TPR-storytelling and helped it evolve into TPRS as it stands today. Although everyone recognizes Blaine Ray's genius, the method would not be as complete and solid as it is without the input of literally thousands of teachers who tried it and discussed their experiments, successes and failures, on the moretprs forum.

Although no one has ever disproved Krashen's hypotheses, it has become fashionable in the world of teaching foreign languages to hint that he's a bit old-fashioned or to disparage his work.  The current fashion is to get students to produce, to speak, to do wonderful, dazzling projects, etc.  Any output by students is nirvana and teachers who furnish input are suffering from a severe case of ego-mania.  "Kill the teacher" has become the buzz word. At a recent international conference for teachers of English as a foreign language, I heard a speaker refer to comprehensible input as "the talk until you drop" school.

I was puzzled by such an attitude, puzzled that professionals have been so quick to discount Krashen without the benefit of any scientific research.  Why go to the trouble of doing a complex study when a sneer can do the job?  I tried to find out what arguments Krashen's opponents used to discredit him.  Just as I have stated that his hypotheses have never been disproven, others point out that they have never been proved.  Which is why they are called hypotheses.  It is very difficult to construct studies which take into account all the myriad factors involved in learning a language.  However, there is a growing body of studies which show that methods using comprehensible input have more long lasting results than other methods.  Basically, when students acquire a language through comprehensible input, they are able to demonstrate acquisition many months later, whereas students who learn a language through conscious study, memorization, grammar exercises, etc., do not retain it.

I was puzzled by the negative attitude of so many professionals because my first timid experiments with TPRS immediately paid off and I could see my students progressing as never before.  Why were my colleagues so reluctant to try it?

We could simply say that they lacked the courage to try something new and different, or that they were lazy.  But I recently read an interesting article by Tyler Valiquette in which he says, "People’s behaviors are based on attitudes, beliefs, and values and (...) changes in behavior rely on changes in these underlying attributes." http://news.yourolivebranch.org/2013/03/04/what-do-you-have-in-common-with-a-low-income-indian-mother-more-than-you-think/

Attitudes, beliefs and values.  My colleagues succeeded in the incredibly selective French school system because they conformed to what was expected of them.  Can we say that most of them have a conformist attitude?  They learned English with traditional teachers and over time acquired a highly competent level.  I can honestly say that most of them speak English better than I speak French.  They have every reason to believe that traditional methods are effective with hard-working, motivated students.  They value hard work and motivation in students, because that's the kind of student they were.  Can we blame them if they are not trying to invent new methodologies?

The problem with Krashen is that if you take him seriously you are forced to discard almost everything we think we know about Learning a Foreign Language.  The first thing a TPRS teacher does is discard the textbook.  Her students make their own, personalized stories which are far more interesting than those in the book. Surprisingly, textbook manufacturers seem to prefer to pretend that there's no such thing as TPRS. Then she throws out the workbooks and grammar exercises, because explicit grammar instruction is 1) a waste of precious time 2) ineffective 3) extremely boring. If you follow Krashen, you realize that correcting errors is an enormous waste of time and effort and frequently (always?) is responsible for raising the affective filter, making acquisition more difficult, if not impossible.  If all teachers believed him, the market for red pens would be gutted.  Pre-TPRS I was very proud of my explanations of grammatical structures.  I had diagrams and visual supports that my colleagues begged to borrow.  Today they're rotting at the bottom of a trunk. I have an even more scandalous confession to make.  I no longer give my students quizzes on the irregular verbs. I don't have to.  They have acquired the high frequency verbs that turn up constantly in our stories.  And when they need the others, they'll acquire them too.  

All in all, when you consider what teachers must give up and abandon if they follow Krashen, it's not at all suprising that so many prefer to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to his hypotheses.  Over the years, as I've come to know the TPRS community, what has constantly struck me is the number of converts who were successful, highly respected teachers with many years of practice before they changed their methods.  Perhaps it is easier for such teachers to have the confidence and experience needed to go through such an earth shaking change.  Younger, less confident teachers are more easily intimidated.  
  
I am not a researcher.  I am a teacher.  Everything I have read by Krashen corresponds to my personal experience in the classroom.  Thanks to Krashen I now understand why students who had passed my test on the passive voice with flying colors could not use it correctly a month later.  I had the impression that once the test was behind them, they wiped their minds clean, ready to start over again.  Krashen explains that what is learned goes into the short term memory. After I discovered TPRS I heard my students using the passive voice correctly, spontaneously, without any idea of what "passive voice" means. And able to answer the same questions a year later.  Acquisition goes into the long term memory.

If I had any doubts about Krashen, his position on the natural order of acquisition would settle them.  In my opinion it is the only explanation of the the "third person singular paradox."  In France students are taught in their very first year of English that the third person singular verb in the present tense takes -s.  During their seven years of English lessons the rule is constantly reviewed and they are penalized every time they forget it.  Ask them why there is an -s on "he plays" and they will tell you that it's the "troisième personne du singulier."  It is safer not to ask them what "troisième personne du singulier" means, because not many of them could tell you that, but they can all recite the rule.  Yet only exceptional students at an advanced level actually pronounce the -s on third person singular verbs.  I would estimate that almost half of them forget to write it, even on important exams when they have time to carefully edit what they have written.  If consciously learning a grammar rule and practicing it for many years was an effective method, why do they have so many problems with this simple rule, which they have learned but do not apply?  Krashen explains that the third person singular does not affect meaning and is therefore late acquired in the natural order of acquisition.  Duh. His explanation makes a lot more sense to me than deciding that students are lazy or stupid.

I began following the moretprs forum in 2006.  A few years later Krashen himself began posting on the forum, answering questions and giving his opinion. When teachers are confronted with administrations that expect to see verb charts and student output, he furnishes them with documents and studies that support the method. When teachers start worrying about "covering" the syllabus, focusing on pronouns, when to introduce the past tense, etc., he is there to remind them that the essential task is to help our students acquire a language.  While his former attitude toward TPRS seemed diplomatically neutral, he has now taken the position that it is the most efficient method he has been able to observe. On the forum, he constantly encourages teachers to put their trust in comprehensible input and to use their precious few hours of class time wisely.  

He has recently given us an advance view of an article that will be published in the International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching. It develops his Net hypothesis and urges teachers to stop targeting specific language structures.  If input is compelling, students will acquire everything they are ready to acquire.  

He says, "I suggest we consider loosening up class discussions and in-class stories. The focus in TPRS has been making input 100% comprehensible, with students being able to understand, and translate, every word (Ray and Seeley, 2008). Some beginners, because of bad experiences in other classes, might require fully transparent input at first, but it might be more efficient, and easier, to gradually relax the transparency constraint and insist only that the input appear to be fully comprehensible. I am suggesting that it is ok, and even desirable, that the input contain a small amount of “noise,” or i+n. 

My interpretation of this is that we should be spending more time and effort at making our input compelling and engaging our students, and less worrying about whether or not we've frontloaded all the necessary vocabulary. 

What a great message!  Our role is to engage our students, to communicate with them about things that interest them, to interact with them as we would with any other person, and the language will take care of itself.  Isn't that wonderful?  It gives me a feeling of freedom and wide open spaces.  I've always enjoyed being a teacher, seeing young faces light up when they "get it."  Thanks to Krashen I now feel like a rider who has been given permission to leave the limits of the arena and to push on into open trails, heading for the horizon.