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Krashen Summarized
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10 thoughts on “Krashen Summarized”
Excellent SDK summary.
Your run of the mill admin might respond, “Yeah, yeah. Some guy in an ivory tower theorizing on SLA. But how do we schoolify it? How do we answer to stakeholders – esp the Board and parents?”
That’s where all the crazed energy sucking production of school-looking documentation comes up. My guy in NY is looking for a Golden Rubric that will pass muster with parents. I contend that his need is contrived – that the parents will be over the moon with other much more meaningful evidence – a great go-to-school-night presentation; the DIN, that their kids are happy, acquiring, retaining, laughing and having a positive attitude. An occasional story sent home – or an illustration with captions – whatever – for a home-school connection, maybe with a short- paragraph-long teacher’s note for context and rationale in layman’s terms- is prolly way better info than they’ve ever gotten from the language classroom!
In my experience rarely do adminz really care to understand the sea change between legacy and communicative practices. They are stuck in the quagmire of the CYA documentation – from syllabi to scope & sequence, curriculum, homework, tests & assessments, grades, & report cards. That’s why I think all the work you’ve (Ben) been cranking out is so incredibly HUGE.
You have hit every front: How the teacher can protect her mental health; deliver quality compelling and engaging CI; align with the research, produce (copy or tweak) all the necessary documentation; assess and report, and love coming to work.
Helena Curtain told us last week that SK has been saying the same thing for 45 years and hasn’t changed. That other research has come out where we need to have kids speaking in order for them to become proficient.
I didn’t know that AES paid for Curtain to come out. She is a textbook company shill, just like Mimi Met, and it is her message that has not changed, not Krashen’s, which with each passing year has taken on more and more power. Moreover, Krashen got it right, so why would he need to change it?
If anyone new wants a full rundown on Curtain or Met, search their names in the search bar here. We understand her in this group. If I had still been there in India, I would have left and probably vomited. So sorry you had to go through that Dana!
I believe it’s very good that Krashen hasn’t / needn’t change what he is saying bc either we learn/aquire language the way he says or we don’t. In my experience of teaching ESL we do and I’ve come a long way in almost thirty years. I started out the traditional way (grammar, work sheets, forced output etc.) and was always dissatisfied with the results and the kind of trudging work in class. By now NTCI is my golden star and I and my students enjoy the lessons bc it’s more like the real life outside the classroom.
I like your point here, Udo. When Helena Curtain swooped down into New Delhi a few weeks ago, she brought to the American Embassy School and our Dana a dark shadow from literally forty years ago, and it is the very same dark shadow that hid Krashen’s message. For all we know, it was a conscious effort to darken his message and keep it from getting out.
Krashen once told me with a very stern look on his face “Ben, you can’t forget that it [the textbook industry] is a $1.3 billion dollar business!” So, as Dana reported from India, for Curtain to say that Krashen hasn’t changed is really a strong supportive statement of his work. He does research for well over forty years and he keeps coming up with the same thing: comprehensible input. Hmmm. Doesn’t seem to be a problem, really. If it ain’t broke….
Plus, Krashen didn’t just dabble in the research. He spent all day every day for many decades testing everything he came up with. So did a tremendous amount of other researchers, who, in order to make themselves important, often found fault in some aspect of Krashen’s work, usually in weak fashion.
Yes, and its a sad business that as far as I can tell the traditional way is still very much alive at universities where the future teachers are educated or why are the textbooks are still full of grammar and other cognitive exercises.
The companies could produce schoolbooks with lots of different interesting stories and pictures for FCR in beginning and intermidiate classes who can’t read original literature yet. But old habits die hard and if the pupils have (too much) fun instead of hard work where is the competition in which so many people believe.
The whole thing with university level language instruction is a joke. They are supposed to lead us, but they are the least in touch with the research.
I looked. There are about ten articles here from around 2015 that talk about Helena. A few on Met as well. Worth the read, in my opinion.
Krashen will be the guest on the Talkin L2 with BVP Podcast on Wednesday 10/24/18
https://www.classroomtapas.com/talkinl2
It’s a call in show. Perhaps someone can call in and ask him to speak about NT? I won’t be able to call in during that time.
I won’t call bc all the emails I had with Krashen re: NT always went down a rabbit hole. And with BVP there, they are likely to intellectualize it too much for my taste. Look, Krashen’s entire opus is in my view based entirely on NT. When the Krashen tsunami and the traditional instruction tsunami met in about 2001, it formed a big TPRS earthquake and the purity of the NT stream that Krashen started in the ’70s got tainted. If anyone does call that question in, I would like to know the answer. Would their answer be (a) clear and concise and point to NT as foundational to successful CI, or would we get (b) the feeling that NT is just another vague and somewhat unimportant term in the current Tower of Babel? I hope (a) but am afraid we could get lots of (b).