I just asked Dr. Krashen permission to quote here on the blog from Foreign Language Education – the Easy Way*. He responded:
Yes, feel free to use anything you want to from Easy Way. It is long out of print, no plans to revive it, too busy trying to resist Arne Duncan’s policies. Best to the gang …!
That the book is out of print amounts in my mind to a mild disaster. It is so clear and to the point and is the kind of primer I want in my classroom during planning periods to remind me what this stuff is all about when I feel lost, which is often. It is my concerted opinion that we can’t grow into our work unless we keep Dr. Krashen’s research at the forefront of what we do. Diana gave me a signed copy and we have some floating around the district. So if you have one don’t lose it.
I will be taking paragraphs from the book and putting them here from time to time. Here is the first one – I’ll just put an indicator of the page after the letters EW for Easy Way as a simple system of citation.
Most entries – the first one below on the Monitor Hypothesis – will refer in some way to various of his hypotheses. Some are just funny in that Krashen way of making complex things so clear that they seem funny. I believe that the man has the capacity to dismantle an entire PhD thesis in one humorous sentence. Here is an example of the monitor:
…some people are able to use grammar rules while conversing. These are people who know the particular rules very well and can occasionally manage the conversation in a way that gives them time to use the rule. This is a very difficult trick, and is also risky: some people plan their next sentence while the other person is talking, which results in a perfect sentence that has nothing to do with what the person said…. (EW, p. 4)
*Krashen, Stephen D.;Foreign Language Education – the Easy Way. Language Education Associates (1997). ISBN 0-9652808-3-7.