Helena Curtain is dangerous to our profession, if one accepts Krashen. Why is this?
In my opinion, Curtain has cobbled together a lot of ideas from TPRS, and misrepresented many of Blaine Ray’s ideas, and even implied that some of them are her own.
Blaine Ray’s ideas work and hers don’t. Why is this? Because Curtain has watered down Krashen and is pushing some instructional ideas that are questionable in terms of being in direct conflict with Krashen, namely:
- use of the textbook
- early speech output
- use of thematic units
- avoiding direct translation
Every one of these things flies in the face of Krashen.
Let us be clear here. This is not a complicated topic. Curtain and Mimi Met fail to see the underlying truth in Krashen’s work – that we learn languages unconsciously. That statement goes for reading too. All of Krashen’s hypotheses are in some way related to the simple fact that if the conscious mind is involved in the learning process, then the language cannot be acquired.
This is a mind blowing statement to most foreign language educators in our country. If they accepted it, they would have to completely retool. This would mean they would have to loosent their grip on the textbook and actually let it to, and most teachers are just not ready to do that. So Helena Curtain shows up and tells them that they can have their Krashen cake and eat it to, which is wrong.
Here are links to some articles that support Krashen’s argument that languages are learned unconsciously. The reader is urged to study them before passing judgement on the claims made in this article: