Once in a workshop in Los Angeles, a teacher mentioned the UCLA researcher Earl Stevick (1923-2013). She said that Stevick was one of Dr. Krashen’s early mentors. The context of the conversation that day during our workshop was about how circling is not needed when using the Invisibles/emergent language because the new language tends to adhere more tightly to students’ memories when images are involved, since the students watched it materialize from the need to actually communicate something in the story. The phrase this teacher, quoting Stevick, used was:
…imagination drives memory, and memory drives acquisition….
Carolyn Kristjansson has written about Stevick at http://www.hltmag.co.uk/feb14/mart01.htm#C4:
In the last telephone conversation I had with Earl, the discussion turned to his poetry as it had done from time to time. Some of his poems were privately published for use in language classrooms and a few made their way into some of his books, public talks, and personal correspondence. Many, however, did not. Recently I came across one of these. While the focus is ostensibly on teacher-student interaction, I see it also as representative of interpersonal interaction in general. It is also wonderfully representative of much of what has made Earl’s life and work a living legacy.
In what we say between the lines of what we say, even and inescapably in what we never say at all, we SEND a message to our students — even when no WORD is spoken, a message. And here between the lines, between the sentences, here in our moving, in our looking, in our silences, here, it seems TO ME is hidden the most weighty, most compelling message they can ever take away with them. (Earl Stevick, no date)
Stevick, E. W. (1990). Humanism in Language Teaching, Oxford University Press.
Clearly, Stevick’s philosophy of language instruction was based on students and their needs and not about them being right or wrong.
I mention Stevick’s name here in case anyone may want to do some further research into this early hero who had such a strong effect on Krashen. His work, though I have just found it, supports what I am doing with the Invisibles, directly through Krashen. Indeed, thinking of teaching languages primarily in terms of human relationships as described above cannot possibly be something new.