Chris, again, congratulations on attracting the attention of the big dog with your paper.
A while back I had asked Krashen a simple question. I asked him how he would describe his own work. I wanted to hear what he would say is the simplest way to conceptualize his work. He wrote back:
It’s not about people, it’s about ideas.
A newspaper man tracked down Pierre and Marie Curie’s vacation cottage. He found a plain-looking woman sitting outside.
“Are you the housekeeper?” he asked?
“Yes.
“Is your mistress inside?”
“No.”
Will she be back soon?“ I don’t think so.”
“Can you tell me something confidential about your mistress?” he asked?
“Madame Curie has only one message that she likes to give to reporters,” said Marie Curie. “That is: be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
[From: Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman, ed.]
In fact, Krashen deserves more and more real field support of the core ideas that make up his work. He needs more, much more. I’m sure he didn’t publish those 900 articles just to keep it all in the realm of resesarch, and to have people bandy about his work in a half assed way as is happening now, for lack of papers like yours.
As you know, I have a suspicious side that the vast majority of teachers claim to understand but do not understand Krashen’s work, failing badly to put it into practice in our school environments in such a way that his findings would best be utilized for us in schools. Sometimes, I wonder if it can be done in a really effective way, in a way that brings real change to our schools.
Do we really grasp the full impact and meaning and application of what Dr. Krashen has done? Where might your study, and others like it, eventually take us? Where might our work in our classrooms, a nice balance to Krashen’s more theoretical work which we in TPRS/TCI are each testing daily in our classrooms, eventually take comprehensible input?
