free livestream on the topic of the intermediate level
I'm here with dr. stephen krashen who is about to talk about the intermediate level he's in Denver Colorado for IFL teen influency fast and on his way to plenty fast in San Antonio but if you can't join us this is the time to be able to ask questions and hear from the currently voluntarily unemployed former University professor dr. stephen krashen and i'm coming to you at a disadvantage because i'd only got two cups of coffee kara has made me a third extra strong so i'll be slowly achieving consciousness as we proceed I'm going to talk today a little bit about the intermediate level of what do we do beyond the beginning level and before I do that I want to review the general theory every talk I've been giving the last couple of years I've been going through this material and I'm not going to stop because I think it's crucial to what we're doing we're in the middle of what I now call a forty years or the wars between two hypotheses comprehension hypothesis and the skill building hypothesis hold on I forgot how life strings work Oh the livestreams work where we have to wait for you all to log in so we're going to start over to make sure that everybody is in the people who just said that they were joining up because otherwise I'll miss the beginning they're like it's scripts more code you can sit some more coffee and say hey we're going to start a live stream here in just a minute as soon as everybody's loved in David Letterman said without coffee I have no trace of a personality Johann Sebastian Bach said without coffee I'm like a piece of dried-up Goethe meet the famous therapist said most of my clients are in their 60s they said they generally feel that if they're about 3035 years old except if they haven't had coffee then they feel a hundred and seven that was about a hundred and seven when I got out of it this morning but it is it's working its way down I think and I'm hitting the high 70s the moment and by the time I finish this I'll be down to 55 I think here's looking at you alright so again we are live streaming from Denver Colorado with dr. stephen krashen and it looks like people are joining so here we go again we're going to start them from the beginning so that if you weren't here for the first minute and you're just logging in now you're not missing anything anyway to increase the volume I don't know perhaps okay let's see give me a second maybe just by getting closer okay I'll get closer to zoom in touch that's about it otherwise you're just okay commander shave your nest egg you're dead time well good morning everybody I'm Steve crash and I'm going to talk about the intermediate level and I'm going to start by talking about language acquisition in general and the last we're involved in what I've been calling a forty years war between two views of how we developed literacy and how we acquire language the comprehension hypothesis has been around since oh gosh before I got on the scene thinks we've talked about it can--it Goodman did James a sure did and that says we acquire language when we understand it and the crucial part is first you get comprehensible input the result of that is all the skills vocabulary and grammar the other hypothesis the imposing hypothesis which is really an axiom I'm afraid is skill building first you start by consciously learning the rules and you practice them over and over until they become kind of automatic and you get them fine-tuned by getting your errors correction Gators corrected and then someday if you keep working on it it becomes automatic and you can use the
language this is a delayed gratification hypothesis and what the research has been telling me steadily for the last 40 plus years the gratification never comes overwhelmingly our studies other people studies show that comprehensible input wins over skill-building every time and I think I've devoted a significant percentage of my waking hours to showing that this is true research from all over the place method comparisons correlational studies case histories etc it's kind of overwhelming so comprehensible input is the winner it's not only just the winner it's also more pleasant and a lot more fun for teachers and for students if you want to give people comprehensible input they have to pay attention to it in order to get them to pay attention it has to be interesting so we must have things interesting in the classroom which puts us way ahead my conjecture effect is no longer a conjecture it's now a hypothesis because I found a little bit of evidence is that most students in class don't like skill-building very few in fact a lot of them absolutely hate it there are a few who like it I just discovered a study published in Canada they looked at kids in the schools in Montreal learning French trig extending French studying English anywhere from two to five percent say they liked grammar a lot that's all I'm afraid they're the ones who become language teachers so you see the pelvis so comprehensible input is win-win it works its pleasant skill building lose-lose it doesn't work it's not particularly pleasant for most people for the public though it's the only game in town it's not a hypothesis it's an axiom and I want to reduce it from axiom to at least hypothesis the intermediate level I'm just going to do one aspect of it I generally divide the intermediate level into two separate things you can do one is content based teaching called sheltered teaching the others free reading reading for pleasure and there are ways of combining them both which i think is really going to be our our solution to problems of academic language etc let me tell you a little bit about the research on it again overwhelmingly the students who read more do better and I want to tell you just a few of the most recent studies to add to the huge pile of stuff that's already out there the research comes from first language second language English other languages etc just give you a piece of things that have got me excited in the UK in London there's a group of researchers at the University of one that have been following the same people for 42 years since the kids they were little babies and they could giving them tests publishing articles looking at their developmental path the last study is relevant to us native speakers of English they gave them a vocabulary test the best predictor of vocabulary of course was reading and it was fiction reading middlebrow highbrow fiction was
a better predictor of vocabulary size than nonfiction very interesting these days there has been so much emphasis on nonfiction in school well turns out fiction is very very good for you here's what's cool for us and for old people like me the effect was there regardless of how much you read when you were younger when you were 5 when you're 15 or being read to in print environment it was there regardless of your vocabulary size when you were 5 or 15 its what you're reading now that contributes to your vocabulary growth so these people at 42 years old best predictor was their recent reading you can get better at any age the language acquisition device never turns off all this stuff is you've got to be at grade level by third grade you're all going to jail none of this seems to be true when I get to be 42 I'm going to start reading I think this is great stuff another piece of new information we I'll give you a little formula it is whole thing and then I'll explain it each hour is 1/2 point let me tell you what I mean study by Benito Mason case histories we do the statistical analysis people who are reading English for pleasure her former students even in Japan they were doing English as a foreign language they all read different things they read what they wanted they ranged in age from people their 20s to people their 70s the Nikko kept track of how much they were reading what books they were reading and their scores on the TOEIC test the TOEIC test is this big deal it's a standardized test of English in some countries it's considered you know the the gold standard your top score counts the scores range anywhere from from a hundred to a thousand to fifty is kind of the dividing line we're now beginning intermediate to get over 250 you get 800 900 you're really good here's what we found people read anywhere from a few months to a year and a half for each hour you read you gain a little more than a half a point on the TOEIC for each hour you read and it didn't matter what subjects agreed with each other you gain a little more than a half a point which means if you read an hour a day for three years for pleasure you'll go all the way from the lowest level all the way to the highest level this is great news this not only shows reading works but gives you a path I want to talk now about the practical side and what the current controversies are some useful studies that have just come out there's been a backlash in the language arts profession concerning sustained silent reading SSR I like sustained silent reading I think we should be doing more of it in our foreign language classes and we're greatly helped by all the nice readers that are coming out we good it's nice starting say second year so did it set a little time aside for kids to read for pleasure in class not the only thing you do with one of several things and this has been attacked books about five books I've got on my shelf and people say this is fake reading this is no good reading needs to be loud and reading shouldn't be silent it should be you know you must have discussions etc sixteen what is that test called collectio AIC TOEIC anyway I have looked at the argument so they call it by the way sustained silence page-turning fake reading I have looked at all the papers that have been published and the books and I've written a response to it first of all this is English native language arts but we're going to be facing this as well people are going to complain about it I'm afraid I looked at all the studies it does happen it's quite rare if you wait for about a month and let kids get started finding books you see very few kids who aren't reading most of them are reading if you do common-sense things where you find fake reading and non reading number one you don't have a good book collection the books are too hard the books are boring the teacher imposes rigid rules you have to have your desk clean you can't ever get up you can't ever do anything but read your book you must read books and not magazines and graphic novels you have to finish every book you start and cetera when you don't do those things and you do it reasonably it works and I think they're all common-sense guidelines I did a study with the prints of trouble just published it again based on case histories we looked at English as a foreign language students who develop long-term reading habits really and are really improving what we found they all had access to books none of them were ever tested on what they read it into skill building that got to select what they wanted to get a quiet place to read it wasn't rigid you didn't have these I think bogus things going on is going on you're favoring classes well I want to go back to the past and bring up some ideas from the old days that I think need to be brought back and revised and I think they're all wonderful comic book reading graphic novel reading the evidence is on our side we know from the regular language arts literature comic book reading is associated with better reading kids who read comics read somewhat better wonderful study of comic books encouraging reading called spider-man in the library came on 1981 brilliant researchers they put comic books in a junior high school library did not allow them to circulate and to go to the library to read the comic book they then looked at library traffic kids going in
on the library and circulation of non comic book material before and after library traffic nearly doubles the amount of non comic book material taken out went up 30% so the evidence is in favor of comic books for adult students we have a little bit of evidence from our brilliant colleague kill slipped
oath and study couple years ago and we just stopped we just kind of published in the IJ FLT comm general which I assume you were all subscribing to free stuff everybody free journal IJ FLT calm you are now officially subscribers anyway we called the title of the article was the spirit of Elvis's in your living room okay your cat could be an extraterrestrial comes from a song by Weird Al Yankovic Kim suck at adults Koreans living in the United States who were medium in English having trouble really much wanted to improve she asked 20 of them they all volunteered to read 10 minutes a day from the National enquirer each of them did it three of
them refused the number of them felt it was below their dignity etc and of the eighth I did it five continue to do it after we were done one of them read it like a textbook starting on page one and underlining the words and gave that up after a few days the rest of them automatically do things right they did
narrow reading they found the articles they liked they loved at places now I understand America I know what's going on here we figured you really do it is nice discussed these things in class at Egypt one of the ladies sent away for the free for the magic reducing cream sugar filled remember anyway this the National Inquirer knows something that the regular the Washington Post doesn't know that most people are not concerned with the details of the g20 meeting the House Ways and Means Committee the latest on you know carbon footprints and all that stuff one things that apply to their lives so more reading that is absolutely relevant going to give them the competence I think to go on to these things we've also looked at what books children really like and it turns out children do not go for the prize-winning books they don't go for the Caldecott winners the newberry winners they like uh sorta they like junk ebooks that are interesting and fun they like goosebumps they like they're wimpy kids stuff so it's good to either way they let kids decide what's going to be in the library etc and the classroom library you get a very different choice than what grown-ups take you choose if you take a look at the Newbery Award winners over the last twenty years you will recognize very few titles very few things that are popular here's another great idea high tech so high tech the Bill Gates would be thrilled it's called the star method an article in the school library journal ledouche Qadri office is the I liked it so much I published a letter to the editor praising high school library you like the book she says the students take a pencil and write us put a star in the inside cover and you return it that's it that's high tech and other kids go to the library they open the book they see a book with twenty five stars they know what's moving and they'll wanna read it really an idea we also have a little bit of research on the little bit of thinking about the advantage of bringing food into the school library people read of Starbucks reading a library not such a bad idea this was this work was done by my being an assistant to the great Jim's release we were in a bookstore one day and he said look at all these people eating and reading business terrific so he started giving the advantages and I just kept writing it down and we published it we think that we are not sure if electronic looks have a future we don't know right now that's the rage in library science bring in more books that are electronic make it high-tech in fact we find the booklets library here and there Jeff McCullough I've just finished a paper I'm using here so we found electronic books right now are the property of the wealthy it's for people who can afford a book readers or other forms of computers where you can read e-books and the ebooks themselves people with individual income under $30,000 are not eBook readers above $75,000 we call middle-class today a lot of them are eBook readers they cost too much they're fifteen bucks or so it's about the same prices buy a hardcover book you can't share it you can't give it away there's no used book you'll use the e-book market etc which is so important for sharing books not only that you got to have a reader in the old days it was you know getting a neat girl that stuff too very expensive even now that the books can be read in different formats not everybody has the technical access and can do it libraries are helping a little but right
now school library's collections are very few electronic books making up something like three percent of your total circulation of both public libraries and school libraries and very few of them have computers and eBook readers available for people to borrow and use etc so libraries come in and they say this is great we've got all this stuff and all this ebook stuff and it's simply in my opinion a sir baton increasing the gap between the rich and the poor someday yes when ebooks are 50 cents and you can share them and we can get an e-book reader for five dollars I will be the biggest fan then it's going to help solve the literacy problem world wide and of course they get better and better all the time but right now it's be able to reach of most people dr. crashing teachers are mentioning some some problems with that like marketing the library books in here are two really good suggestions your classroom library that may not matter putting a post-it in every book or clerking a post but hanging a poster in the classroom you near the classroom library great ideas lots of ways to get around it okay I recommend that you put your money where your PIN is you got ideas like that comment on it write it up put in a short notice in the IJ FLT journal that's what it's for let me give you a guilt trip if you have a good idea and we just heard several very good ideas you guys are going to think of things that I won't I am an ivory tower University professor with no knowledge or day to day problems that's for sure I could follow you around for three years and be your assistant in class and go through the GPRS training etc and I still wouldn't know what you would know so got to have this information from you write it up if you have anything that's helpful to anybody it's your obligation to share it with others let me be very brutal about this you have an uncle your favorite uncle there's prostate cancer you meet a young man at a party you say wasn't so what do you do I'm a biochemist working on prostate cancer do you have a house work on home we got it we've known this for three years we've got the cure it's this combination of vitamins it's going to come out you know there's bad chemicals and get rid of the bad cells and all that well we've told anybody either when we see this in the newspaper oh it's just for our own satisfaction we're not on this ego trip we're not going to publish this all career stuff no this is our currency this is our obligation so please consider writing up something short on these ideas and send them to ikf LT and they can go into the teacher-to-teacher column it's these everyday ideas that are so important the university professors have no idea one of the best things that's happened to me professionally as I spent three or four solid days with Jason Prince thanks again Karen frigate is you can take Jason over years ago it was really cool we did a conference in the new Republican Czech Czech Republic in Brno and he had a lot of talking on the airplane back and forth and one of the things he told me is that the one of the things you must include in teacher preparation and education the stuff like
other drop teachers how to use cardboard right how to make input comprehensible using props etc the ideas you just suggested some of some of you are in that category of very important things that professors who are more interested in like me you know captain's like me we're more interested in footnotes and citations I'm never going to know so please share it please keep contributing them we have anything else before I go on on my tirade anyone have any questions before we keep going Olga I don't understand your question you want to try and rephrase it and we'll see if I can answer it because I do it that happens just start again we haven't stopped broadcasting waiting for questions if there are any questions we'll stop right now after talking about this this section and that or away can go on to the next I think we're going to go on to the next I don't see any questions but I'll I'll wait hold on you mentioned to write the ideas and send them where I J FLT not come just go there and you'll be connected to the journal take a look at the last issue it's free downloads for exams absolutely free journals cost too much money and the couple that are coming out that are open access and ours is one of them and this is terrific and you will see the instructions right there another submit things very simple take a look and see what other people have written the instructions on how to submit our inside of each journal and you can click it up on the first page and there's a link to it so it's not even hard to find and it'll tell you what the requirements are for submitting so I have a couple of questions here do podcast and audiobooks have similar benefits yes audiobooks are fabulous audiobooks the research on audiobooks of course has been exclusively with first language but they have found just what you know that people use them when they're doing other things mostly driving I live in Los Angeles oh my gosh I would go nuts without audiobooks I'm constantly going through audiobooks they're very few in other languages oh my and Harry Potter came out Jim Dale Wow it was so exciting you'd be driving places you pull up at your destination sit in the car and wait to hear the end of it I'm a member of two libraries so I can get their audio book collections etc came from one local library one in my community and people doing the exercise when they drive the impact on literacy development is pretty much the same huge impact on vocabulary listening comprehension grammar knowledge of the world fiction builds your knowledge of the world
people who read massive amounts know more about history geography practical knowledge etc you get habits of mind a better sense of what other people's or other people are thinking so yes it does not have every single advantage that print reading does but my gosh it's wonderful and what I'm happy to say now is that a number of the books that are coming out with the TP RS publishers now have audio versions you can send in and download it or there's a CD available which i think is a great thing in fact we just finished the second volume Linda Lee and I of our collection shake on the second book is out and I've been listening to Linda because I'm a my mandarin student now and I've been listening to her wonderful reading it's so nice looking at the credit etc we don't have to look at the print while you're reading just looking at the reading is fine if you want to look at the print go ahead but this is a great source of aural comprehensible input oral comprehensible input has been one of our problems because kids cannot you know for doing languages like German and French you're not going to hear a lot of it in the community so we have to build the library of easy things to listen to and audio books is one of them so yes let's push forward on this a couple more questions but I think they're getting answered ideas for increasing classroom libraries for free too little money okay right away at the basic level beginning level we can do this within a month we can have heaven on earth we can have massive classroom libraries here's the idea in our classes we do a lot of stories and create stories with co-created stories with kids I say a good percentage of these stories are really good in fact you have this experience you ask children to write something creative and you give twenty attempts and other than twenty times three or four are as good as anything you've ever seen okay Darcy Pittman was sharing with me some of the things her students are producing in Spanish they're wonderful they're so entertaining the beautiful let's make them available let's put them on the Internet let's share them with each other for free and give our students credit for their contributions no publishers no money no nothing we have started this with Mandarin we've called it the great Mandarin reading project it's on healers website ignite Chinese and a number of us are contributing to a things from our students I have written three essays in Mandarin which are giving better check out okay so we can do this overnight with all the talent that we have worldwide you know your class and Rhode Island your kids essays can be read by someone in Alaska back and forth so that's an easy one to solve and I think we should go for it there's one question that's kind of going in a different direction or maybe I don't know if you want to into it right now but it's we have one teacher in our group who's skill-based and against GPRS or CI any thought to get her on board you know if I knew the answer to that this all would have happened a long time ago we have been working on this for a long time the comprehensible input hypothesis came on 1975 ok quite a while ago and there has been in some ways really good progress we have this in the area foreign language as we note the tt-rs movement the natural approach people now the story listening people have you know made enormous contributions and it's people are using it in we have joined forces not as much as we should in the whole language which is a very similar philosophy free voluntary reading is at a resurgence good bilingual programs based on the same principles but there's still a lot of ignorance about it the people that I am most interested in in getting to are not the hard core who will never believe it but the open-minded middle people are open to these ideas and the way they're going to get it is through seeing other teachers doing it experiencing it themselves once you experience it yourself you see it so the demonstrations that we do at conferences etc and eventually that's a way of getting to parents May 2008 I think it was I was invited to Thailand to private school international school there when Linda Lee was on the faculty and I got there and I discovered it okay what gives a background this is Thailand in the bangkok area and the parents of the school are largely of chinese descent and have a great deal of admiration for chinese culture did not speak Mandarin
she offered a free class for the parents in member once a week for a whole year one third of the parents signed up for the class which we're having do people 70 people that's how they can they hung in there that's how they got the methodology by feeling it themselves the kind of steep crashing theoretical talks are not going to convince everybody obviously but you feel it yourself you actually see it happen again when you started in 2007 he was a fluency fast meeting and Karen Rowan who's in charge of today's show came to my dorm room at 7 o'clock in the morning with latte and say get out of bed you are going to Linda's class early and you're going to hear Jason Fritz you're going to see these people no I'm not yes you are so fine way to the class and I saw it and I was already involved with natural approach comprehensible input and I saw the power of the storytelling the power the personalization the power of these teachers overwhelmingly friendly and open attitudes toward the students and it was that experience I could have read all the theoretical papers but is actually being in the class with 15 hours going to Jason's intermediate Spanish classes and now seeing all these wonderful teachers do it that has had the impact this is what I think we need the actual experience of it hooked it up I'm gonna scroll back and make sure I miss any questions but I think I'm caught up if I miss any let me know it's possible that it's Mike who has the links to the already Spanish stories online on if somebody has a link to his page could you put it in this speed I see his name but I don't I don't know what the site is and that will be there there we go [Music] FBR class library wordpress.com and I think I kind of LC that's great see we get together we got these solutions we share them it's wonderful all right and if there are any more questions we'll let it move on and we all ended I'm going to move on and close this up program but I want to ask and answer the burning question that everybody has right now professor crashing dr. Crafton how could we access your books and your ideas thank you for asking that question that obvious that the question who it was asked was comment stephen krashen was Harry Potter and willing even more Oh
Harry Potter's wonderful let me talk about Harry Potter Dolores Umbridge yeah JK Rowling is a brilliant brilliant writer and if you look at her stuff on education it's amazing if you compare like history of magic taught by this ghost with Defense Against the Dark Arts and potions you see brilliant teaching compared to a horrible teacher okay you see the caricatures of teachers Gilderoy Lockhart my favorite character you know can really Harry Caray celebrity is celebrity does your homework assignment is to what would Gilderoy Lockhart think of the following Dolores Umbridge who took over Hogwarts for a while at this great conversation
with Harry Harry set up a class alternative class and defense against the dark arts because it was taken over by a pendant and he set up this underground class and of course Dolores Umbridge the temporary headmaster found out about it and Harry said you know the way we're doing it why are you doing this the way you're doing it now there's this is no real world application it's just theory Jesus Harry there is no real world tests are what it's all about so I wrote some satirical articles with Dolores Umbridge has just been appointed Assistant Secretary of Education from the US Department of Education she would unfortunately fit right in yeah JK Rowling this is what JK Rowling is what fiction is all about one of my students wrote an essay is there MoneySmart very good question yes no both etcetera so yes Harry Potter absolutely the ability get to the big question and where you can find my stuff books not so much anymore my old books are available for
free download at www.appraisercitywide.com shared them etc I'm still writing books here in there but you can be sure that if anything's in a book it's also on the website they're all by not all my articles but there's several hundred articles already posted on the website free download do not ask or permission just do it you may share it with anyone except Donald Trump of that but that doesn't matter anyway so yes all the stuff is there and more and more scholars are doing this because most of the journals are not like IJ FLT calm most of the other journals are writing long brutally difficult articles that are largely irrelevant to what we're doing so a few of the others we're doing at others are doing online open access free we've got to get information out people Jim Cummins has his stuff on his website a lot of people are doing this this is the future all right thank you very much for joining us if you haven't done a live stream before you can click the share button however it will only be shareable if people can are on this list er today because it's a closed group so if it's not working that's why or any other technical questions before we finish we will be at is LT in Denver for the rest of the day and then San Antonio Texas blue super fluency pass advanced Spanish with Jason and I'm doing intermediate Spanish teaching Don Quixote and Sabrina will be using advanced French and then the national tt-rs conference is the lowly week and then we are going to sleep for the rest of the summer so thanks for joining us and I will we'll talk to dude