What stages do students pass through in learning a language? Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, tells us about the conduit hypothesis. We discuss the role of reading, the growing importance of listening and how to encourage students to read and acquire more through comprehensible input.
Stages and Stories in Second Language Acquisition (with Stephen Krashen) Transcription
Ross Thorburn: Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This week on the show we have a very, very special guest, Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California.
This episode, I asked professor Krashen about the different stages the students go through when learning a language and maybe how teachers can help to speed up that process. I hope you enjoy the interview.
Stages in Language Learning
Ross: Professor Stephen Krashen, welcome to the podcast. Can you tell us a bit about the "Conduit Hypothesis?" And maybe take us through the different stages the students pass through in learning a language, and then afterwards maybe talk a bit about how teachers can help students in that journey.
Stephen Krashen: Let me run through the application and what it's based on. By the way, those here who are experiencing financial hardship as everyone is, let me say a few things the will help your career.
If you want to be famous like me and get invited to be interviewed like this and get quoted, there's one surefire way of doing it and that is make up new terminology and this worked for me, it's been great, and make sure that what you say is not quite comprehensible so people think you're smarter than they are. That's what I've been doing. I've got a new term, with that in mind...that was a joke by the way.
The new hypothesis is called the Conduit Hypothesis, which is really nice because nobody knows what I'm talking about, and it says we acquire language and develop literacy by going through predictable stages and each stage is a conduit to the next one, it sets you up. I've hypothesized that there are three stages we all go through in first and second language.
Stage number one is stories. Kids hear stories from mommy and daddy. They hear stories in school, they hear stories at the library, they hear stories in kindergarten, pre‑school, etc. I should tell you, by the way, the last 10 years or so, I've gotten very enthusiastic about stories and fiction in general. It's extremely powerful for teaching you just about everything, language, life, philosophy, all this.
Anyway, the research on hearing stories is very good. Kids who hear more stories do better in school, they do better in virtually everything that they're tested on in school. Young kids who grow up with privilege hear stories all the time. Other kids don't get a lot of stories and they don't do so well. Our second language methodology is based on stories.
What Beniko Mason's been working on is a method based on what she calls story listening where you'd tell stories in class, make them comprehensible through drawings and occasional translation, and it is hypnotic. Kids really, really like it, and a research on it is first class.
The idea of the story is as a conduit to self‑selected pleasure reading, reading the new like on your own. To the beginning of the self‑selected pleasure reading stage, she has introduced a stage called guided reading where students are given a huge amount of extremely easy stories to read, really easy, and you read a lot of them, you read hundreds of them.
In this contrast, with what we do in foreign language education, what we do is we are given the hard words, hard vocabulary, hard grammar, but first the reading selection piles them all in and so the reading selections for beginners are hard, and then the second year you're supposed to read authentic literature which is ridiculous.
The languages I speak well, I have had lots of easy input. German, French, Spanish, etc., I've had lots of it. There's pedagogical books, there are what we call Graded Readers that are simplified, lots of them. The languages I'm not so good in, there's nothing to read for beginners. You need lots and lots and lots of extremely easy input.
My goal is that students will be able to read for half an hour a night from the beginning. Easy text that they find quite comprehensible, they rarely have to look up words, etc., that are so interesting they forget that it's in another language. That's the goal of pedagogy.
If they do that for a year or so, they'll be ready to move on to Graded Readers and eventually easy, easy authentic texts. They have to find a couple of authors that they like. Once you find an author you like, you've got it made, you can make progress.
Again, in my own case, I had books everywhere. My father brought home comic books and said he would pay for all of them if I liked them, which was great. The research on this, the amount of pleasure reading done, without question, is the best predictor of virtually everything, reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing style. The more you write doesn't matter, the more you read, the better you write.
Reading is a better predictor of writing competence than writing is. Evidence from the comprehensible input idea.
The research overwhelming pleasure reading counts as pleasure when you get to select it yourself. Our feeling is that school should do these two stages.
The third stage is professional reading and school sets you up for this. We hope that if you read a lot, you'll find your interest then you go off on your own. I'll give you one study and one case history, Michael Faraday. Michael Faraday was a chemist, considered the greatest scientist in his time, about 300 years ago. He lived in heavy poverty in London.
When he was 10 years old, dropped out of school, went to work for a bookbinder. This bookbinder was a wonderful guy, he changed the world, helped all of us. He said to Michael, "I want you to put my books together, paste them and paint them. But look at these books, they're all here." The guy owned a small bookstore too. He said, "Read them, take a few hours a day and read them. I don't care. Let me encourage you to do that."
The next 10 years, Michael Faraday read for pleasure every day for hours. He read fiction, he read non‑fiction. After all this reading, his only contact with the world, that led him to the conclusion he wants to be a scientist. Got himself apprenticed to a local chemist, a naturally fairly well‑known chemist, and when Michael was 26 he published his first scientific paper. Basically, merged chemistry and physics invented developed electromagnetism, changed the world.
He had, in my opinion, the two things that are the basis of good education, all the reading he wanted to do, self‑selected reading and trying to solve problems in an area that's of interest to you. In school, they make sure kids have lots of books access they can select themselves and we hope that will help them discover their path.
Specialized reading is the third thing and this happens later. We don't need to teach English for academic purposes. English for specialized purposes, that comes on its own if you keep reading.
Jeff McClelland linked me to a really good study in fashion and literature. He had the patience to read it through, fortunately. Science fiction, first language study. People who read science fiction have a chance, if you look at the text, to acquire all the academic vocabulary, good portion of it, that you need to understand scientific text. It's all there in fiction. They do that on their own.
Also, one more study again in front me, this one began as a UK study. There's a group at the University of London that has been following the same people their whole lives since they were babies. The last time they were tested, the subjects were 42 years old.
They gave them tests of vocabulary and a questionnaire. The best predictor of vocabulary in first language was fiction. Middlebrow and highbrow fiction were by far the best predictors, non‑fiction was less powerful as a predictor, it is fiction that counts.
Let me switch to political. It is my obligation to tell you about a letter I got published in the Washington Post a few months ago. The Washington Post had run a series of articles about spelling specially Donald Trump's problems with spelling. People wrote down, they said, "You're being too tough on this guy. Why are you worried about spelling? It's just a matter of getting someone to edit it for yourself, checking the spelling."
I wrote in, they published a letter, I was amazed, and they said, "The problem is deeper than spelling. We know from our work that reading is a very good predictor of spelling. People who read a lot snare a few exceptions but are generally OK spellers. That's where a lot of reading and spelling competence comes from.
"There is more to it than that, though. The research also shows that people who read fiction know more. They know more about history, they know more about geography, they know more about science. Also, current research has shown that people who read more have more positive habits of mind. They don't jump to conclusions, they're more careful, they're more open‑minded in general."
I concluded my letter by saying, "Donald Trump is a classic case of a non‑reader and his non‑reading has hurt all of us who published him." Reading is wonderful, it does all these things and we only are going to take full advantage if we support libraries.
Using listening as comprehensible input
Ross: I think often when we talk about comprehensible input, we assume that we're talking about books and we're talking about reading, but obviously now listening is becoming more and more common with Internet and anyone listening to this is obviously listening to our podcast.
Is there anything that makes reading special or is there a lot of potential there for students to get comprehensible input through listening?
Stephen Krashen: I really don't know, that's a wide open area. I have great respect for listening. I live in Malibu, which is like 30 miles from where my grandchildren live, so I'm on the Pacific Coast Highway all the time, also Gold's Gym, going into the city and the only way you could do it is by listening to audio books.
Of course, it all started with Harry Potter which I got on disc, which is just sensational, my gosh. This was so good that when you pull into my daughter's driveway and all that you want to stop and listen to the rest of the chapter before you get out.
That started it and when it was over and I had gone through all eight discs it was kind of sad so I started looking for other things. The last 10 years I have been listening to detective stories, I've been listening to sports stories, I've been listening to everything since I normally wouldn't do. Oh my gosh, these so‑called ordinary writers are very, very good. These are brilliant people.
I think it's helped me a great deal just to understand the world. I got into John Grisham for a while, I read all and listened to all his books, I think it's worthy here of law school. It's very, very well done.
Instead of Michael Connelly's, I've known about how the police department works, all these things beautifully done. I have increasingly more respect for the question you asked in the potential of listening. I don't think you need to listen and read at the same time but I think both is what you want.
Ross: There just seems to be so much potential there. It is in there for language acquisition to be taking place when students are doing other things. Certainly, I listen to podcast when I run or when I do petitions or whatever, maybe students could be doing the same.
Stephen Krashen: People do, when they drive and when they exercise. This is a wide open research area. There have been very little research on this. People have found that, yes, people do listen to audio books when they exercise and they drive, we knew that, but they have not really gone into the potential that you bring up which are these, wonderful thing to investigate.
Even just interviewing people, what has it done for you, including audio books and libraries, making sure they're there. Just extending the power of listening to stories to longer texts, etc., great idea. Thanks for bringing that up.
Practical ideas on using The Conduit Hypothesis
Ross: For teachers to find out more, to see some of these ideas in practice, do you have any recommendations for where to go on the Internet?
Stephen Krashen: I'll say it now and I'll say it again, go to benikomason.net, my colleague in Japan, and she's worked out a really dandy method of taking people through the steps. First stories then free reading, etc., with demonstrations and she links you to other websites that give you demonstrations of teaching techniques, telling stories, how she does free voluntary reading, etc. That's a really, really good place to begin.
Ross: That was Professor Stephen Krashen, everyone. If you'd like to find out more about his work, he has an amazing amount of free resources on his website. Go to www.sdkrashen.com, books, articles, there's a huge amount of stuff there, go check it out and learn more. Thanks for listening and see you next time.