Dr. Stephen Krashen, a Conversation About Language Acquisition (4)

I hate comprehension questions.

And there's a famous Brazilian educator who now passed away Rubem Alves,

who said that nothing discourage the reader as much as being asked

questions about what he or she has read.

What's your reaction to comprehension questions?

The same as yours.

Absolutely horrible, horrible.

And it is true.

Nothing would discourage me more than having to ask answer questions.

That's why I like self-selected reading topics.

I have questions in my mind all the time, because I'm a human being.

Pleasure reading things you select has many of the answers, which is a

segue for me to talk about another of my obsessions not just about

reading itself and reading fiction.

In a nutshell, yes, it's good for language.

We know that people who read more have better spelling, grammar, all that

stuff, bigger vocabulary write better.

They also know more people who read fiction, self selected fiction,

know more about everything.

It's fabulous.

This is an argument for good libraries and self-selected reading, et cetera.

Finally, people who read more, have more understanding of others, more

empathy for the rest of the human race.

So there are some people who really need to read more.

Okay.

I agree with you.

And furthermore research shows and I, but I can't find that bit of research

right now, but the best sort of...

to track how successful people are socially, uh, academically, uh, you know,

professionally more than the number of years spent in school or university or

postgraduate it's how well they read.

It's even more interesting than that.

Okay, I'll take that and move it along.

Big study was done.

Uh, Stanovich in Cunningham, one of the best studies ever done in

reading, uh, they gave people a test of second year college students.

They gave them a test of general knowledge, kind of what you should

know when you graduate secondary school and had a variety of areas.

You know, science, current events, social studies, uh, practical stuff, technology,

uh, the best predictor of course, was familiarity with popular literature.

Which included magazines.

TV was a big zero.

What didn't help was not a predictor how well you read and your grades in school.

Hmm.

Wow.

So doing your homework didn't really count.

It's your pleasure reading.

It gives you general more overall knowledge.

Whoa.

I have a question here from someone who asks, if you cannot speak to a tutor,

is shadowing talking to yourself ideal?

Any thoughts?

I have no idea.

It's not, none what...

uh, I kind of doubt it, but I'm speaking just from what I feel,

not from any research on it.

We do it all the time.

We can't help it.

I don't know if it, if, if it does any good or not.

The, uh, shadowing is this technique whereby while you're listening to

something, you try to sort of talk along, you know, repeat what you hear.

I have found that I am rarely able to continue doing that.

I can do it for a while.

I gave it a shot.

And, and if the material is, is essentially easy enough, like are

many stories at LingQ where I'm familiar with story, then I can do it.

But if it's something that's of interest to me, if I'm listening to

something genuinely interesting, I don't want to confuse myself by trying

to repeat what the person is saying.

So I've never been able to maintain that, but there are many people who

do like shadowing, but, uh, again, not something that I've been able to.

The whole idea of even trying it out makes me feel uncomfortable.

okay.

Here's some more questions.

What is the ideal ratio of listening to reading input?

Should one of them be preferred?

Depends on what you can get.

I've never thought of that because it's always been kind of a struggle

to find the comprehensible input.

But that's another question I really don't know.

My suspicion again, this is a suspicion is that there is

an, a, a minimum of listening.

And after that, it doesn't matter.

The more you get of either the better you are.

I think another consideration is obviously there's far more

material available in writing.

There's material available only in audio, like a podcast I'm reluctant to

listen to material where I can't get, unless I'm very good in the language.

But if I'm at a 30% comprehension level in a podcast, I want the transcript.

I want to have a chance to try to understand what I'm

listening to understand.

Uh, but other than that, and the other thing about listening, of course, it's

easier to do so I can do it in my car.

I can do it while making breakfast, reading.

I'm committed.

I gotta sit there and read, I can't read and drive my car at the same time.

So I think it's a function of what's available to you.

Uh, what time you have to devote to one or the other task.

Uh, I, and also what you like to do.

So I'm, I think I'm always reluctant is that you should be 60% reading

and 40% listening or something.

I think depends on the individual.

Yeah, no answer to that.

Here's another one of these questions that I don't think there's an answer to.

When is the right time to come back to a previous language?

I'd say, uh, seven o'clock in the evening.

You know, again, it's, it's so dependent on your circumstance.

If you're about to go to Mexico and you haven't looked at Spanish for six years,

that's the time to start refreshing your me, your Spanish, you know?

Uh, what do you think about the practice of reading aloud?

Uh, listening to someone else read aloud.

Fantastic.

I don't know that your reading aloud does any good at all it's output and

you're not paying attention to meaning.

I agree.

And again, it's one of these things that I have tried and have

never been able to continue doing.

Right.

I would, it feels boring before I even start.

Right.

Here's one though that comes up all the time.

What do you consider fluent to be fluent in a language?

Wow.

I, it depends so much on circumstance, on situations.

Okay.

In some situations I'm actually fluent and very impressive in languages I can

hardly speak and depends on the person.

Uh, that's so true.

So it is incredibly variable.

Again, I invite someone else to start working on it.

I, I, my own view.

If you can use the language in a way that you are not uncomfortable and

the person listening to you is not uncomfortable, then you're fluent.

And I, if we wanted to be more specific, I tend to see it

as B2 on the European scale.

In other words, you have enough vocabulary that you're likely to understand much

of what a native speaker says to you.

And you're likely to be able to express yourself on a wide range of subjects.

Even with mistakes.

To me, that's fluent.

God, you just made me fluent in Spanish.

Thank you.

All right.

Fantastic.

And here's another one: can full phonological acquisition

be achieved through input alone?

Good question one.

I'm prepared to answer.

Okay.

Same thing.

Um, I think we're a lot better in pronunciation than we think we are.

Uh, in fact, I think the ability to perfectly acquire accents is

there the language acquisition device never shuts off.

We don't use our best accents cause we feel silly.

I wanna relate to you the in incident that started it.

It happened when I was teaching in Ethiopia a long time ago, and there was

a, a British guy visiting our school, worked for the British council, I think.

And we talked about his experiences in high school, French, uh, Secondary school.

He said the final exam you had to get up in front of your French

teachers and speak to them.

Nothing is more humiliating for a young man than they have to do that.

So he decided to come in and make fun of the teachers and show

them up for the fools they were.

He dressed French.

He had a beret.

He had a glass of what looked like wine and he started to speak.

He says, ah

... he thought he was making fun of them.

He got the highest grades possible.

He said, where have you been?

That's great.

Why haven't you ever done that in class?

We can't do that because we're not a member of the group.

It's not us.

Peter Ustinov in an interview, said - his French is very good.

I've heard him in movies.

He sounds absolutely perfect, but he doesn't use that accent

when he speaks to native speakers of French, he has an accent.

We have an output filter and it's because accent is a marker of group

membership of club membership.

Uh, when I made someone from, uh, London, I don't start

speaking with a British accent.

I can a little bit.

Okay.

But it seems funny, awkward, and maybe even feels insulting.

So we have these powerful, effective blocks.

We're a lot better than we think we are.

I agree with you.

I have said in the past that in order to pronounce better, even to learn languages

better, we have to have a sort of an attitude of cultural weightlessness,

you know, and, and, you know, I lived in Japan and or if a, if say a north

American Anglo Saxon English speaker is very proud of being, you know, English

speaker they're reluctant to be foolish.

They're reluctant to just be culturally weightless and just try

to hear the language and repeat the language and just go for it.

So I totally agree with what you're saying.

That's been my experience.

Yeah.

I, but it is hard for the public to accept this.

I got a, um, invitation to meet with someone I was told was extremely

wealthy business person from Germany, living in Los Angeles.

And I was driven to his, uh, house up in the Hills, expensive.

He wanted to get rid of his accent.

And I gave him my little theory there.

Uh, and he said, no, that's ridiculous.

I said, what if I got you a sound spectrograph and we got native

speakers of English and you try to max match their pattern.

Yes.

That's how to do it.

I said, it's never gonna work.

He showed me the door immediately and told me to leave.

People would never believed this it's there within us.

We can do it.

Don't worry about it.

There's good reason we have an accent.

See, A I personally, if I hear someone who has, uh, a noticeable

foreign accent, but uses the language.

Well, I, I respect those people.

In fact, more than someone who has almost no accent.

So there there's no advantage in if you're being, if people understand you,

there's no real advantage in being like mistaken for a native, which I don't

think is achievable for most people.

Uh, also I think getting back to what you were saying, we have

to wanna be part of that group.

So every time I've, you know, tried to learn the language,

Japanese, French, Chinese, whatever.

I wanna be one of them.

I don't see myself as this foreigner trying to learn this language.

If I'm in a group with them, I'm one of them.

That's that kind of attitude I think helps us.

And so I do believe that that, and oh, and the other thing I was gonna say.

Okay.

An actor, an actress, they have to play another role.

Right?

So they are very good at accents because they're used to the idea of seeing

themselves as not John Smith, but as this character that they're playing.

And, and on one last note, there was this American actress whose name