Dr. Stephen Krashen, a Conversation About Language Acquisition (1)

I'd like to ask each other about our early experiences.

Sure.

Okay.

Why don't you...

...in French?

What happened to me in French?

All right.

Okay.

That's a good start.

Okay.

I'd like to

... yeah, go ahead.

Hello?

Okay.

I think we're live.

So we have the two Steves here.

that's right.

We have the two Steves.

We have Dr.

Steven Krashen, who is to me, the person who has explained the world,

the sort of snake pit of Pandora's box of how you learn languages.

And he's reduced it to something that's very simple, which con...

basically confirms all of my experience in language learning.

Dr.

Krashen the language acquisition hypothesis, we're gonna get into that.

Very happy to have this opportunity to speak with you.

And I'm very happy to be here with my language consultant

and therapist, Steve Kaufmann.

Who's helped me in so many ways.

Let me tell you.

Well, that's very kind of you, you know, you were saying just before

we went live here, that it would be interesting to review our early

experiences in learning languages.

What, what did you have in mind?

Well, let me give you mine and then you'll respond appropriately.

Okay.

Um, I grew up middle class privileged in the, in Chicago and my, and I

heard Yiddish all around, but nobody expected me to understand any of it.

And I didn't now I can ... yiddish that comes later.

Okay.

That's another, that's another story.

A very happy one.

Um, uh, but I took French in high school.

I got a passing grade in French from my kind teacher under the condition

that I never take any more French courses at that high school, cuz

I was such a terrible student.

All right.

I had no interest in it.

It was boring.

I went to Hebrew school.

It was beyond boredom.

Then things happened.

My mom set it up.

So I would go on a tour, a bicycle tour, a youth host tour of Europe, down the

Rhine Valley with a bunch of other kids.

Really nice.

We went to a youth host in Switzerland and went to a party, nice kids everywhere.

I sat around and listened to a conversation, basically being, uh,

managed by one young man who spoke to some kids in French, some kids in

German and spoke to us in English.

And I thought that is so cool.

I wanna be like him when I grow up, that really changed it.

And I decided on the spot that I would get good at languages.

Uh, when the Peace Corps tour was over, I went to Paris.

The advice of one of our leaders of the group, I went to the Alliance

Française, took a couple of weeks of French, got much better.

Came back, took French, took German.

And then the big breakthrough, my major was music, piano and my piano

teacher, Malcolm Bilson, who is wonderful, um, suggested I go to

Vienna and study with his teacher.

We had a terrible ... we had a horrible argument, like one weekend and I, I

stopped with her, but I stayed in Vienna.

My parents were so nice and so generous.

Took German classes.

Got really good in German.

That was the real reason I got there.

And this is the end of this, uh, little segment.

Um, everything I did was right.

I had a group of friends in those days.

English was not the lingua franca.

You spoke, we spoke German and a lot of them were better than I was.

We recommended reading to each other, which books were good and gradually

native speakers who liked to hang out with foreigners joined the group.

That was a wonderful, perfect immersion experience that got me going.

After that was the, oh, I'll just mention three good things that happened in

Ethiopia that pushed me along: joined the Peace Corps so I wouldn't have to

go to Vietnam and avoided the draft.

Uh, I learned to speak Amharic which was a lot of fun, cuz people were so friendly.

Uh, and I met my wife there.

She joined the Peace Corps cuz she was an idealist and wanted to help people.

So, and we're still married 55 years later and it's still wonderful.

So these are good things that happened and I discovered coffee.

Okay.

Aha.

Okay.

Okay.

Steve, tell us your story.

Well, with specific reference to learning languages, first of all, the

number of things that you talked about there, I can also confirm, first of

all, uh, uh, you know, at school, I, I, unlike you, I did get good grades

in my French, uh, but I couldn't speak.

And, uh, and that was typical, like in Canada, in the French language, other

than French immersion, which is a recent phenomenon in Canada, I dunno, 10,

20 years people in the regular French stream don't learn to speak French.

The better students get better grades.

The poorer students get poorer grades.

If one of the students has a Francophone, Francophone parent,

they're probably gonna do better.

Uh, but by and large, they don't learn in the classroom.

What happened to me was I went to McGill university.

We had a, I took a course in French civilization.

We had a professor, Maurice Rabotan, who was a phenomenal professor, not because

he forced French at us, but because he made the world of French civilization

history so interesting to me that I got totally motivated and living in Montreal,

even though Montreal in those days was two thirds French, one third English.

And if you lived in the English part of Montreal, you might

just as well be in Chicago.

Uh, but if you want to access the French language, there's radio,

there's newspapers, there's Montreal University there's a whole bunch of

things that you can do, including watching, you know, movies.

And, and eventually I went to France.

So it, it was my motivation to sort of my interest in the language and, uh, the

other thing too, uh, you mentioned that you, uh, met your wife in a way related to

your interest in the world and so forth.

And so did I, uh, I worked for the Canadian government.

I was sent to Hong Kong to learn Mandarin, Chinese, and I met my wife in Hong Kong

and we've been married for 53 years.

So we're catching up to you.

Uh, but certainly I discovered then that all of the instruction about the

niceties of grammar and particularly when the teachers select what you're

gonna read, so mostly you're not interested in what they push at you.

And in those days there wasn't so much in the way of, you

know, there were no MP3 files.

There weren't even cassette players.

So there was very little listening.

It was mostly reading with a long list, word list and, and

things that were of no interest.

Once you get actually motivated in what you're reading about, it

gets back to your compelling input.

Then you don't notice you're being carried along by your interest in the

subject matter or your interest in communicating with other people and

the language just starts to pile in.

So that, that has been my experience, uh, with French.

Oh boy.

Yeah.

So when did the change come?

Well, like change be came very quickly.

See, one of the things I think is although I'm a critic of,

um, school language instruction.

In fact, if you spent 10 years passively doing stuff in

French despite the effort...

oh, the, the interesting thing is I went to a, a football game.

We have the Montreal Alouettes and, uh, we had a problem with our

ticket and I had to explain this to the usher who was a Francophone.

And so I had to kind of find some French words at age 16 or 17 and I still remember

to this day that all I had was words.

I didn't have grammar.

The teachers had only taught grammar.

And all I could say was ... you know, like, I couldn't produce the

grammar, but what I did have was words.

And so I'm, I remained to this day convinced that the best sort

of way to evaluate your, at least your potential in the language

is how many words do you know?

You know, how many words do you know, even passive.

So, uh, but yeah, but eventually of course, once I got really interested

and I watched movies and I listened to radio and then I went to France

and I had to do all my schooling in French and write essays in French

and answer oral questions in French.

Of course then it just, it just cascades.

Yeah.

There you have it.

Very good.

I have a question that one of our members at LingQ put on our forum.

And unfortunately Eric said he was gonna find the name of this professor,

but there was a professor who did some work, which showed, purported to

show that if you start speaking too early, before you have 2000 hours of

listening or some number, then you might develop some bad pronunciation habits.

Uh, Have you any thoughts on, you know, when is the right time to start speaking?

That whole business and people I'm sure they've asked you this before.

How do we transition from acquiring the language, getting the language, getting,

getting the brain used to the language.

How do we get from there to output?

Okay.

I can give a partial answer to that.

I don't know the complete answer.

And that's a good research question for eager scholars, I think, but

there is a problem with early speaking and I'll tell you my story.

Um, we used to live down the street from a family that had a daughter the same age

as our daughter at the time around five years old, which is nearly 50 years ago.

Okay.

And I used to get the, we'd get the girls together to play.

And one day it was my, my, um, responsibility to pick up both girls after

an hour, bring her to my house because the mom had to go off and take her Spanish

course at the local community college.

So I went up, I said, okay, girls, let's go.

She said, wait, I have to take my pill.

She goes in the bathroom takes this pill.

And again, we are good family friends.

I said, what was that?

She said, well, today Valium, today would be Prozac, anti-anxiety medication.

So again, relying on our close friendship, I said, well, why are you taking Valium?

French class, it freaks me out.

And I said, what is it about French class that makes you so nervous?

When the teacher calls on me having to talk before I'm ready.

I interpret that as having to use stuff you've consciously learned

and not being able to work on...

to use what you have acquired.

I thought this is something.

I looked at all the research found more and it's all there.

One of the biggest anxiety producing things is having to talk before

you're ready in a language class.

Now there's some interesting anthropological research

that backs this up.

A guy named Sorenson went to the Amazon Valley and looked at a group

of 10,000 people on the border between two countries who spoke

like 24 languages, not all related.

10,000 is not that much.

You go to a football game there're 10,000 people in the stadium.

That's not very much, but, and so this is really not a big number.

They were all pretty good in languages.

They picked up mommy's language, daddy's language, language of their

friends, gradually the language of all the local lingua franca

and were heavily monolingual.

So Sorenson interviewed them.

How do you do it?

We don't try to say anything.

We don't force it unless we think we're ready.