Dr. Krashen says this about T2:
1, The goal is comprehension of a story or other CI activity.
2. This will not require as many comprehensible/interesting reps as in T1. The goal is comprehension of the story or activity, not full acquisition of the rule in a short time.
3. The source of the rules to be targeted is internal, from the story.
4. This kind of targeting may result in full acquisition when used in one or just a few sessions, but it generally results in partial acquisition. Full acquisition is used when the item is used in again in another story or activity.
But how can one measure partial acquisition? How can one gather data on what has been acquired? I thought he said that we can’t do that. Because it’s all in the unconscious soup. How can he know what is full or partial acquisition? It conflicts with what I know about his research. He has changed lately, just in the past year or two. What he is saying now vs. what he has said in the past is confusing to me.
What is especially troubling to me is this:
…full acquisition comes when the item is used again in another story or activity….
I was lead to believe in reading SK’s research since 2001 that acquisition is a much more time intensive thing, that it takes truly massive amounts of time to really acquire an item. These new statements about T2 smack heavily of TPRS and the school-based curricular thing that it has morphed into and is called TCI by lots of people now vs. what we know real acquisition is – a totally natural thing that can’t be forced where we only focus fully on the message and the acquisition happens on its own, like in Story Listening).
What is even more astounding in my view is that SK rejects T1 outright now, but that is what TPRS has largely become over the past 15 years:
…note that T1, taken to the extreme, can lead to a return to the audio-iingual method. If there is major pressure to “master” a given rule so that it can be used in production, and when this cannot be done in the amount of time/comprehensible input reps provided, teachers may be tempted to force production….
That is a good description of what happened to Blaine’s vision over these past fifteen years, so SK renouncing T1 as too connected to meeting curricular goals within school buildings is a good thing, in my view, because it was getting out of hand. Of course SK would say what he says above, since he points to the primacy of NT in much of what he has written since 2009:
…I argued for this option [NT] in Krashen (2013). It rests on a corollary of the Comprehension Hypothesis: Given enough comprehensible input, all the structure and vocabulary items the acquirer is ready to acquire are present in the input, and naturally reviewed. In other words, we don’t have to aim at i + 1, i + 1 will be there…
And also on NT:
…NT asserts that we should not use a grammatical syllabus even if it is based on the natural order. Rather, aspects of grammar will be acquired in the predictable natural order as the result of exposure to comprehensible input….
(How can we base a curriculum on the natural order if we don’t know what it is?)
And he even puts forth a hypothesis about T2 that conflicts (maybe I am missing something) with his other research:
Hypothesis: At the end of the term (e.g.) one academic year), T2 will result in the full acquisition of many of the rules imposed on us in T1.
The problem that I am having with this new hypothesis is that Krashen, who has never been in a classroom and who is a pure researcher, doesn’t seem to get one simple fact: typical language classes contain kids that generally split into three groups within each class with (a) 5 to 7 kids actually processing, (b) about 15 faking it (I’m guessing at these numbers but they represent the 33,000 classes that I taught in my career), and (c) another 5 to 7 being in the classroom only physically.
And where did he do the research on this new hypothesis? I think it came from hanging around with TPRS people. I do think that SK doesn’t know how uninterested in school many of our kids really are in terms of wanting to learn. So many of them just want the grade. Where does all the research help us when we are faced with that every day?