Dr. Krashen just wrote an article – in draft form – after St. Louis and sent it around. I will publish it here with his permission but first it might help to read the text of his new – but I think still being developed – Compelling Input Hypothesis for a little background before reading the actual new article tomorrow:
Stephen Krashen
The English Connection (KOTESOL) in press
It is by now well-established that input must be comprehensible to have an effect on language acquisition and literacy development. To make sure that language acquirers pay attention to the input, it should be interesting. But interest may be not enough for optimal language acquisition. It may be the case that input needs to be not just interesting but
compelling.
Compelling means that the input is so interesting you forget that it is in another language. It means you are in a state of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In flow, the concerns of everyday life and even the sense of self disappear – our sense of time is altered and nothing but the activity itself seems to matter. Flow occurs during reading when readers are “lost in the book” (Nell, 1988) or in the “Reading Zone” (Atwell, 2007).
[ed. note: related blog posts here on this topic are https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/04/14/letting-go/ and https://benslavic.com/blog/2009/06/22/flow-in-tprs/
Compelling input appears to eliminate the need for motivation, a conscious desire to improve. When you get compelling input, you acquire whether you are interested in improving or not.
The evidence for the Compelling Input Hypothesis includes improvement as an unexpected result, the many cases of those who had no conscious intention of improving in another language or increasing their literacy, but simply got very interested in reading. In fact, they were sometimes surprised that they had improved.
I included several cases like this in The Power of Reading (Krashen, 2004, pp. 22-24): Both students and teachers were surprised by the students’ startling improvement in English after they became avid readers in English.
More recently, Lao (Lao and Krashen, 2009) described the case of Daniel, a 12-year-old boy who came to the US at age eight from China. Daniel’s Mandarin proficiency was clearly declining, despite his parents’ efforts: They sent Daniel to a Chinese heritage language school but it was clear that Daniel was not interested in Mandarin. He was also not an enthusiastic participant in a summer heritage language program supervised by Dr. Lao, even though it included free reading.
Then Dr. Lao gave Daniel a few books written in Chinese to take home. One was an illustrated chapter book, “The Stories of A Fan Ti.” Daniel loved it. The book was a bit beyond his level, but thanks to the illustrations and his ability to understand some of the text, Daniel was very interested in the story, and begged his mother to read it to him. When Dr. Lao learned of this, she loaned Daniel more books from the “A Fan Ti” series, in comic book format. Daniel begged his mother to read more, from two to five stories everyday. Daniel liked the books so much that he would do the dishes while his mother read to him. Both Daniel and his mother were quite happy with this arrangement. Daniel’s Mandarin was clearly improving, but he wasn’t aware of it, nor was he particularly interested. He was only interested in the stories.
The Compelling Input Hypothesis also explains why self-selected reading is typically more effective than assigned reading (e.g. S.Y. Lee, 2007).
An important conjecture is that listening to or reading compelling stories, watching compelling movies and having conversations with truly fascinating people is not simply another route, another option. It is possible that compelling input is not just optimal: It may be the only way we truly acquire language.
[ed. note: of course, that crucial last sentence – “…it (compelling input) may be the only way we truly acquire language…” – vividly points up our dilemna as classroom teachers. If Dr. Krashen is right, then how could we make ANYTHING compelling to all of our students when they are forced to be in our classes? It is a real conundrum. It’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with some of our kids, right? TPRS, as Dr. Krashen has said many times since 2009, is the “best thing out there”, but this new hypothesis certainly might not apply to most if not all school language teachers when sometimes even a fire in the classroom might not qualify as “compelling” to some kids. Maybe this hypothesis is for people who don’t work in schools, who don’t have to grade, who don’t have to make up lesson plans and put up objectives on the wall every day, who don’t have to deal with kids lost in trances, many of whom have yet to develop and appreciation for what taxpayers are buying them, and who are split off from the joy of learning by the very fact that they go to school.]
References
Atwell, Nancy. 2007. The Reading Zone. New York: Scholastic.
Csikszentmihalyi , M. 1990. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York:
Harper Perennial.
Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Second edition. Portsmouth: Heinemann and
Westport: Libraries Unlimited
Lao, C. and Krashen, S. 2008. Heritage language development: Exhortation or good
stories? International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 4 (2): 17-18.
Lee, S. Y. 2007. Revelations from Three Consecutive Studies on Extensive Reading.
Regional Language Center (RELC) Journal , 38 (2), 150-170.
Nell, V. 1988. Lost in a Book. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
