What Teachers Need to Know (and What’s Stopping Them) (with Stephen Krashen)

We talk with Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, about the teacher research knowledge gap: what do teachers need to know about second language acquisition, what are the barriers stopping them and what we can do to solve this problem. We discuss open access journals, the Grateful Dead compressible input, compressible output and evidence based language teaching.

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Ross Thorburn: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This week, I'm very excited to tell you that our guest is Professor Stephen Krashen from the University of California. This episode, I ask Stephen Krashen about what teachers need to know and what stops them from finding out. Enjoy the interview.

What Teachers Need to Know About Language Learning

Ross: Stephen Krashen, welcome to the podcast. Can you start off by telling us a bit about what the teachers need to know? What sort of research and concepts, maybe, from second language acquisition do teachers most need to know about?

Professor Stephen Krashen: What I want to do is talk a little bit about theory, what I call the 40 years war.

Stephen Krashen: It's actually longer than that. God! You know how it is when you discover that your old pair of pants is 30 years old and your new pair is 20 years old?

Stephen Krashen: That's the situation I'm in. Anyway, the 40 years war is really now nearly the 50 years war. This all started in the '70s. It's a war between two hypotheses. One of them, which I think is the good guy, I call the comprehension hypothesis. It's very simple, says we acquire language and develop literacy when we understand what we hear, when we understand what we read.

Credit where credit is due. I am not the inventor of this idea. I have been mostly responsible for public relations and seeing if it's true or not, but there are several people who were there before me. In the field of literacy, Frank Smith, raging genius, in my opinion. Kenneth Goodman, the whole language people were, in my opinion, all there. They had it.

We learn to read by understanding what's on the page. We learn to read by understanding messages. In the field of second language acquisition, people like James Asher, Total Physical Response, he was there before I was. Harris Winitz, a foreign language expert in the States, was there before me.

A whole number of people had the idea pretty well. I do try to cite them in my work. This is what we've been working on since the '70s. We acquire language when we understand it. Here's the interesting difference, the rival hypothesis, we call skill building. Skill building and comprehension idea are complete opposites in terms of cause and effect.

Comprehension hypothesis says the cause is comprehensible input. The cause is understanding what you hear and what you read. The result is vocabulary, grammar, writing style, all these things. Competence, in other words.

Skill building reverses it. Skill building says the first thing you should do is study. Do things consciously and work hard. Memorize vocabulary. Learn grammar rules. Practice them in output. Get your errors corrected. Make sure it's right. Do this again, again, and again. Then someday in the distant future, you will be able to use the language.

I call this a delayed gratification hypothesis. Not happiness now, but happiness later. Comprehension hypothesis says happiness now. In fact, it's got to be pleasant or it won't work. You have to have input that you understand and that you pay attention to. You'll only pay attention to it if it's interesting, if you like it, if it means something to you.

The problem with skill building is that the delayed gratification never comes. In my opinion, there is not a single case of a human being on this planet who has ever acquired language using skill building. Every time you see someone who got good in a language, they've had comprehensible input. It's never there. It never exists without that.

In our studies, where we compared comprehension and skill building, which is really all we've been doing for the last now 40 years or so, comprehensible input always wins. It has never lost in all the experimental research, not one. It's more effective, and it's more pleasant.

My observation, and it's backed up by the research, if you look at kids in a skill building class, 95 ...