Stephen Krashen and Steve Kauffman conversation
hello stephen krashen good morning Steve Kaufman we are on the tain same timezone and in many ways on the same wavelength absolutely I have to tell you you've been a great influence on my language learning it's a real privilege to be able to talk to you and to share now with other people who are going to follow this interview some of your thoughts on language learning oh gosh oh shucks I have to return the compliment I've read your book I've looked at I must I am now your student officially Oh on your website I've been doing Mandarin and Spanish and I greatly admire what you've accomplished thank you very much no the there's a certain amount of controversy still like for a believer in input like me that the battle is over but there is still a lot of controversy there are people who say input only won't do it you need grammar how much grammar do you need how much output do you need can you sort of and I'm sure you've been at the sort of the eye of the storm and so far so far as all as this controversy is concerned where do you see your 5 theses today to what extent has it with withstood the test of time withstood the criticism and so forth well I'll begin by quoting Paul Simon still crazy after all these years ok I think the hypotheses have held up very very well let me give a little historical perspective when all this started in 1975 when we first stated that there's something called a language acquisition the first goal was to show that acquisition is real at the time people fully believed in what I call the skill building hypothesis at first you consciously learn something then you practice it over and over again you get feedback and eventually it becomes automatic which I call a delayed gratification hypothesis work hard study do your grammar do your vocabulary and someday you can actually use the language you can understand it you can
speak it well the my claim is that the gratification never comes it doesn't work and it's painful and the comprehension the hypothesis says that you can have a good time now you can enjoy yourself you can listen to interesting stories go to movies read good books and the result of that is language ability very different so the first task was to show that this was real and I should say that this is not my idea originally other people had it before I did I have simply been responsible for public relations before I by the way do we have a lot of time for this just cause you like I okay I got some nice stories all right good
good good I hope people knew about it before I did in the field of foreign language teaching james asher TPR knew about it before I did a Leonard Newmark professor from University of San Diego knew about it before I did Harris win it's a scholar from Kansas knew about it before I did and published about it and I had read Asher's work when I was a graduate student and I thought this was just amazing now it turns out this is going to get weirder and weirder I went to my uncle's my aunt and uncle's wedding anniversary 50th anniversary Morrison and Newmark and Leonard knew mark was there turns out we have the same and uncle from different sides of the family so Leonard knew mark whose work I've very greatly been influenced by who I admire we're on the same wavelength turns out to be more or less in the family here's another one uh people in other fields have come up with the same hypothesis before I did Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman have hypothesized that we learn to read by comprehension we learn to read by understanding what's on the text what's in the text and things like spelling vocabulary most complex rules of phonics are the result of reading well Ken Goodman is married to a very interesting lady named Yetta Goodman who is a vigorous scholar and hero of the field and we have always been good friends and one time I was at their house in in Arizona and I was staying with them we were that close and Ken says tea Etta Yetta tell Steve the story of your family the way you usually related and she did it Kunta Kinte style in Yiddish right which is her family language so
she started out in the other saying my name is yet a Goodman originally Shapiro my family I'm the granddaughter of blah blah blah we come from this little village shtetl called the dish anchor and I said wait a minute live dish anchor that's where my father's family comes from Mary Ganesh in which country in Eastern Europe it keeps changing countries okay Poland whatever exactly in that whole area so and her Yiddish was highly comprehensible to me turns out and yet l'addition ker is a tiny little town of 3,000 and my family in Chicago always went to l'addition ger picnics and there's a little Carrera in the cemetery and all this so yada and I have to be relatives because it's such a tiny town right and here we are I'm always honored when I'm criticized in the same sentence as Ken and yet a Goodman and it turns out that we're related sort of related to now yet as yet ish is much better than mine my Yiddish is really fake from German okay so she speaks a more pure form and always scolds me for it but you know so be it so the theory is the idea of comprehensible it is not mine it comes from other people what I did is put it in the context of a larger theoretical framework and I've been gathering evidence for it since 1975 in the beginning the idea was to show that this was real right and then study after study yes it's real people get better from just comprehensible input then the research started to focus on grammar which is your question what about conscious grammar does that play a role and I had hypothesized that grammar is not bad it's not evil it's not teach grammar go to jail it's just that it's very very limited and its primary function is for editing in order to use it as an editor you know you're about to save the sentence you think about it in your mind and you make little changes based on your conscious knowledge rules but conditions have to be met and these very daunting conditions you have to know the rule and we know only fragments of language Cordia jeomsun right you have to be thinking about correctness as you're using it right and you have to have time to apply the rule and what I'm happy to say is that in the last 15 years there has been a parade of studies in the professional journals attempting to show that grammar is important to my mind they all show that the impact of grammar is there but it's limited I think it can be useful it's an adjunct but it's not the whole thing it's a very peripheral part of any language teaching program the way it is helpful for most of us is when we write because our versions of any language are always a little different than the accepted standard when you consider English my first language your first language there are little aspects of written English that we do each of us has our own idiosyncrasies they're different from the standard for example my favorite example is it's it's one with the apostrophe one without according to my scientific studies and that's basically asking people to raise their hands my conclusion is that two-thirds of the well-read public has acquired the it's it's rule another one third and that includes me have not our standards in written English are very high so you got to get it right and I think it's important that I know the role and I can make these Corrections when I edit it's limited but it's helpful here and there so grammars that it also gives you more confident all so keep it out that makeup yeah I'll tell you how I how I use grammar all right good I find is that overwhelmingly I learned the language through input I learned the language subconsciously as you say because the words for example that I consciously learn are a very small part of the tens of thousands of words that I've had to learn in rockland check just recently for example so i acquire all this through my input activities but with the grammar i also acquire most of my familiarity with the structure of the language through input however and I believe that the brain gets used to it through this massive input like again on link I have statistics showing that I've I've read 150,000 words of check so I've had and I've listened to it all so I've had massive input however some things I just don't notice I just don't notice you know an example in Russian you know one of something is I think it's the degenerative singular something two three four is another word and five and more is another word you may not notice that and so I keep my little grammar book by the toilet and when I'm sitting there I can sometimes I'll flip through the grammar book and I always find something that makes me aware of something that I haven't noticed before so so to me the grammar much like the output activities it makes you aware of your gaps and improves your ability to notice and helps the brain notice as the brain is going through this you know the main activity which is the listening and reading so how do you deal is is that an appropriate use of grammar does that in any way I don't think it contradicts the input hypothesis but it suggests that grammar in that way helps you notice things okay first of all I think the stuff that you say you haven't noticed it's probably very late acquired mmm-hmm things like in French you know that shows KJ please that little little ending on the past participle late acquired probably leaving the language to in many cases does make a lot of native speakers don't do it also it's not are aspects like that and when you see it in a grammar book and it's simple because you've acquired most of the language you can probably monitor thoroughly well I find that when I speak German or when I speak French languages I know the best I monitor but not very much just a few things here and there so I can sound a little more educated my favorite trick you know and play nosotros is just nobody else should know what you should do if you really want to impress people as you get the subjunctive wrong and then do self correct and they think ah yes he's really really so there are tricks like that so I think yes that oops and some people can do but wait a minute look who you are I accuse you Steve Kaufman of being a member of a lunatic fringe and I am too I am also in this group we are fascinated by language fascinated by grammar books fascinated by the rules we are really far out there like point 0:01 of the human race I do what you do I think my idea of a good time is
looking at a grammar book I don't know just to see how the language is put together we call this language appreciation linguistics so there are two requirements that have to be met number one you have to have acquired near a lot of the language already number two you have to be as you and I are very interested in the structure of language per se so with those constraints in mind nothing wrong with it I just confess to you I do to it to but compare that with a beginning language student who hasn't acquired even one percent of the language and being forced to monitor the whole thing now some language teachers like us went into the profession people like us because they love rules and they teach them over and over again it gets more and more obvious to them every time they do it that that's the problem the overwhelming you know hint of grammar are beginning students and I think that grammar as linguistics is fine I think there's a general education value to it if I were I think high school secondary school language arts and secondary school advanced foreign language should cover some linguistics small part of it Chomsky's incredible ideas of language universals bidding in a to universal and the idea of language change in dialects and how is language acquired but it's not the main thing it's peripheral okay well again on the subject of questions another aspect of your hypotheses is the idea that we should always be dealing with first of all compelling and interesting content I fully agree and and that's where the enjoyment comes in if it's interesting and compelling content I'm turned on my brain is turned on emotionally I'm committed to the language I want to understand the content that's all great however what almost contradicts that is this this n plus-1 a sheltered reading guided readers graded readers I can't deal with that I find that I got two or three months of slogging through that kind of simple stuff to get myself to a perch where I now attack the real stuff with 40% unknown words my do I have link to help because I can look up the words as I go and I can save them but I have to get myself into that meaningful authentic you know content with resonance as soon as I can or my interest declines so how does that you
know conform to the idea of n plus-1 always that next level of difficulty i think paul nation talks about 95 percent 95 percent yeah and known words well if it were 95 percent known words i'd be years acquiring the vocabulary that i need in order to read Tolstoy or or or listen to you know political discussions on the television and so forth you have just described the problem of language teaching with capital P L and T this is the problem let me restate the problem what our research concludes what I think is the best hypothesis is that for language acquisition to happen input has to be comprehensible and very
interesting even compelling I have done the easy part me and my colleagues we've done the easy part we've shown that this is true application is the hard part just the reason you talk about I'm going to restate your question it's very easy to give people input that's comprehensible but not very interesting that's school it's very easy to find input that is interesting but not comprehensible that's real world language outside the classroom and of course I must add that many of my colleagues at the university dedicated their entire careers to giving us input that is neither interesting nor comprehensible the problem of language teaching is what you describe I think we are approaching it gradually possibly asymptotically the goal is for beginning classes to be riveting and beginning reading to be riveting and we're getting closer this is why I like methods such as TP RS Blaine Ray's idea Wow you go to some of these classes and they're amazing I went to a demo across the street of Pepperdine University which I helped set up given by a guy who I think is one of the best teachers of all time Dickinson Fritz Fri tze free commercial for just gave us a beginning lesson in Arabic which had all of us at the edge of our seats because he made it so much fun and
so interesting with incredible personalization was about the people in the class about them their opinions gradually we're doing this and the graded readers are getting better we have not solved the problem we're getting better and better and better I'm trying to find interesting easy input than Mandarin and as you know I've I'm creating it myself mostly because I can't find very much other than that Terry Wallace has written a couple of really interesting books that you're both with full characters and pinyon in Mandarin which are helping when we add the Blaine and his colleagues and trying to mention as many people's names as I can here and Karen Rowan and Carol Cobb have produced a lot of good easy books and in Spanish but we need a lot a lot more and they need to get better and better this is the problem we all have so all I can do is restate it and say that I've done the easy part meaning my colleagues have the hard part is interesting in comprehensible well you know I must say that that I find that in my own language learning because I don't have the time to go to school and I've heard all about TRS but I've never been in a TP RS classroom I study on my own so if I look at my real materials with with Czech and Russian where there's an abundance of phenomenal material on the internet history politics things that interest me that with link I'm able to pull these in relatively early and fight my way through 40% unknown words it doesn't matter because I have the audio I'm saving the words the words are highlighted in yellow when I come across them again because I forget that I've ever looked them up and so that for me as a perhaps maybe not a typical language learner that works I'm not sure it works as well for the average person who doesn't have the confidence in their own language learning ability that I do and so that's again well so that's a bit of a problem that we're trying to deal with I think a lot of our members have created wonderful sort of diary of taking my kids to zoo and stuff which if you're learning Portuguese and you you know you follow some lady in Belo Horizonte and Brazil and her life that's interesting and and it's made easy so between you know going straight to the literature there are these sort of intermediate level high beginner level things that our members are spontaneously creating and where we have the audio and we have the text and sometimes we have notes so that is providing a bit of a step you know in that direction yeah yeah I think your website is a real step forward in providing this I also think that people
vary in their tolerance for noise right some people require my colleague Steve Sternfeld calls these battered language students some people require completely transparent input and that is where they have at least the illusion that they're understanding everything and the tipi our classes try to do that which i think is okay but it has its limits you can't be transparent forever I'm kind of between that level and you I'm now in Spanish is pretty well down on my list of competencies in language I'm kind of low intermediate I can have a easy conversation on everyday topics but nothing complicated I'm now reading star trek in Spanish right because I love Star Trek okay and I can now say things like you know Klingon man of war has just D materialize out side the starboard bow in several languages which might help you never know uh but I'm I understand about 60-70 sometimes eighty percent if it were less than that I couldn't do it okay I don't have the degree but the trick is its compelling for me I love the stories well that's what I find if it's compelling I'll fight my way through it but I recognize as you say I call it sort of incertitude like I'm quite happy to deal with things that are fuzzy I don't have to know exactly what this means you know I have a I have a completely mistaken understanding of what's in this sense it doesn't matter to me you know and that's why for example I always resent in language class you know these comprehension tests nevermind the comprehension I got my half-baked you know understanding of what was there I'll revisit this everyone said I'll understand it better not a problem but I agree with you that maybe a lot of people maybe most people are troubled with that they want to nail things down and I just find in language learning you can't nail things down until eventually I hope I hope people like that eventually get over it there's a great quote from John Holt in one of his classes I think he was teaching fifth grade a little girl came in will stew and she was reading Moby Dick and he said isn't it a little hard for you she said no I just skipped the parts I don't understand which we're willing to do yeah which is great you know the long descriptions so part of the strategies people need to get is that you don't have to know every word you can skip etc and people are going to very I hope with more experience in language this requirement of transparency gradually disappears right well which reminds me it's just like the version here but one of the things that has one of the things that has interested me and in the development of link is whether this would have application for literacy learning because every other reading that I have done suggests that a vast majority of people who are incarcerated who are not call it successful in life you know whether economically or socially low self-esteem the whole works are people who read poorly and so obviously there's a percentage of people can't decipher the letters but there's a much larger section of people who simply read poorly and I think where you provide people with audio where you provide them with a system for accumulating words and tracking statistically that in fact the vocabulary is increasing as we do at Linc wouldn't this have application for people who are not sufficiently literate in their own language to be successful in the terms that we normally consider people successful now we're talking about people who are not good enough to be independent readers like the idea people who are in the lower 50% aisle and there's a lot of these probably the lower 10% I'll notice at least the literacy advocates talk about you know 20 or 30 or 40 percent of people who are quote functionally illiterate who have trouble reading manuals at work who have trouble you know communicating effectively reading more you know beyond the grade 7 level and so forth and so on well if you're up to the grade 3 or 4 level you're pretty good Archie comics and a lot of others are at the second grade level goosebumps starts at the 3rd grade level some easy-easy novels Judy Blume all this stuff which is great reading starts about the fifth sixth grade level in fact adolescent and young people's literature today is better than adult literature and we have comic books and magazines bestsellers are at the seventh grade level okay so much I'm avoiding your question for the Ryan because that's something else much of the problem people have in prison is a lack of access to interesting books and I have single-handedly decided to solve the problem myself and I'll tell you about the heroic action that I've been taking I joined a group called book muqaam that's how I'm getting booking books in other languages cheaply you put all the books on your shelf that you have that you want to get rid of and you know people like us we don't want to just give books away to charities we want to give them to people who want those books right so I list my book my book on book much like I have an extra copy of a biography of Gandhi someone from New Jersey wants it requests it I send to them I pay the postage I get a point I can then use the point to request other books so I use this to get books in other languages from other countries
book much is one of the only groups that does other countries that's book müjgan Islam yeah I love okay at the end of the year here's where I've been single-handedly solving the literacy crisis at the end of the year I have extra points I may have 50 points extra at the end of the year you can donate the points to libraries and I always donate my points to prison libraries and school libraries at the end of the year so if every middle class person did this in the world school libraries and prison libraries would be very well stocked okay that that's that's my scheme now people in prison a lot of them just need a lot of interesting stuff to read but the basic lower lower lower levels nearly every method works some work faster than others everybody who goes to school in North America reaches that basic second third fourth grade level the way to get beyond that this theory voluntary massive reading this is in first
language in second language where you don't have a chance to hear it the link webs like might be very good I don't know they would be good study to do okay yeah no I that's one thing I'd be quite interested I've approached various organizations and of course they all hold up their nose oh you're for profit you're this debt and I've never had anyone willing to pay any attention to what we're doing but that's a oh my gosh that's outrageous because the profit people are running education in the United States and are very open about it the whole common core standards is nothing but a big economic ripoff for the point oh one percent you can quote me on that anyway yes yeah third I would like to follow up because I think what obviously in our society the better we read the better people do economically individually their lives are better the whole society does better it's it's just a wrapper goes the other way around the wealthy classes the people who are middle class have access to books therefore they all read better in their kids no I agree with you I agree with you anyway okay let's get back to the sort of foreign language acquisition I've seen some very motivated people like I attended this American conference for teachers of foreign languages whatever I met a lady there whose name I can't remember at the University of San Diego and she's and a number of the teachers were very modern I must say I was overall overall very very impressed and yet the results of language teaching in our schools if I look at French instruction in Canada to the English speaking school system and I've heard it's the same with regard to Spanish which is the big foreign language in the United States that despite all of these very motivated dedicated many of them very fluent in the language they're teaching even though they're not necessarily native speakers yet yet the results are so poor and there's been umpteen you know examples of research I mean if you compare like 30 years ago 50 years ago things have been researched to death and I'm not sure that there's been any progress at all so you know when we'll go to all of this research directed in better results in terms of language instruction in our school system okay let me begin by restating what you said and give more evidence that you're right the state of affairs in foreign language is really pathological because we know that the kids who do well say in college classes are the ones who had it in high school already we are called false beginners and they're the ones who dominate the class and go on and dooba the true beginners getting nowhere and really go to intermediate classes like literature it's filled with native speakers or students who have been to the country for several years who've been to Europe or spend some time in Quebec and then take intermediate French literature etc so the whole thing is is a charade in my opinion it always has been and again what you suggest which is all I'll spell out because it makes me look good is that comprehensible input based methods have been shown again and again no exceptions we have won every single method comparison study since the 1960s every time you pick comprehensible input against traditional language teaching we win on tests of communication our kids are much better on tests and grammar there's either no difference our kids are a little better and our kids are far more likely to continue is true beginning methods it's true of intermediate methods content-based shelter we know that reading is very powerful one of my favorite studies I was part of we looked at subjunctive among Spanish speakers kids who've studied Spanish and the only predictor that counted it wasn't how much you studied it it wasn't how long you lived in the country it was reading reading for pleasure so we know over and over again why haven't people done this a good question I wish I knew this is my failure to master the art of public relations and get this around one source of opposition is natural and acceptable and that is the loyal opposition whenever something new comes out it is the scientists obligation to question it and get started and do studies etc my problem is that those who attacked it have not thoroughly understood the theory or even superficially understood the theory so there so when they see a tiny little speck that says the grammar might help here and there they then assume the grammar is wonderful and that's all we should ever do there's also frankly an economic force if this is right the textbooks are out of business most of them I and we have to drastically retool another way out is to take the step that you've taken that I do and that is focus on independent language acquisition what can people do on their own and websites such as yours and other people who work with independent students this is a wonderful way around it I'm all for it my colleagues Jeff McQuillan and Lucy say have a very nice ESL pod back calm and whoa boy they've been more good than I have because they just give people people have had a little English in school worldwide comprehensible text comprehensible things now to listen to I hope they're having that and this is helping a lot of people everywhere and they write I'm sure they have about 50,000 subscribers it's great it's terrific it's what needs to be done a point you made when you read an art when you posted a comment about rosetta stone I thought was very important and what you've made again here and that is we have to set up opportunities for independent acquisition just like you I don't have time most people don't have time I do my listening when I'm on the elliptical machine right Gold's Gym yeah which is now my my affiliation mount USC when you know when I go for walks it Center in the car and reading when I have time through the day you know when I'm in security lines and airports pilot says put your tray tables down and I'm waiting for elevators in bed at night so we need to service these people provide them with interesting text to listen to interesting things to listen to and I think this might change the field more rapidly than anything so keep up the good work all right I will you know Steve and I I have the impression we could go on for a long long time and what I would like to do is is end the sort of official part of the interview and thank you very much for doing this
and I'm sure that my viewers of my youtube channel will really really appreciate this and then I could maybe have a few words you after the I shut down the video so it's a deal thank you Steve okay thank you very very much