Do you agree with Krashen's language acquisition theory?
I wonder how many people have heard of Stephen Krashen's language acquisition theory, and based on your experience leaning Spanish or English (if it is not your native language), do you agree with his theory or not, and why?
His research discovery is very helpful for me to learn Spanish. However, I do not know how his theory can be applied to improve listening and speaking skills.
Here is a video lecture given by Dr. Krashen if you are interested in his research results, or you if you are interested to find out how multilingual skills can help prevent brain aging.
5 Answers
I agree with some of his ideas, but not all! Especially because I've experienced those myself while learning English. First and most important, total immersion, second, more immersion! No doubt, no question about it, that is the best way, the fastest! You can try hanging out with your "Hispanic, Greek, French, Italian etc, friends, but that will never compared to total immersion. If you can go to a place where people are not going to try to practice their English knowledge with you, that would be the best.
- Something very important, that I found very helpful, is to force your brain to think in the language you are trying to learn. Think about this, Every morning you wake up and your brain start spinning at a thousand miles an hour thinking in all the littlest, unimportant things of life. "It's already 5:00 a.m? Good grief! It is still dark out!, Where is my bathrobe? Oh, no, that is my sweatshirt!, I know I put my slippers somewhere here!, Oops, that is not my slipper, that is the cat! Etc. Make the effort to think of all these things in the new language, if you do not know the words, use the dictionary! Introduce yourself to the "everyday language"
- Stop reading, listening to music, chatting, watching T.V. in your native language. Every time you switch, you go backwards! Your brain is resilient and wants to go back to your roots, to your comfort zone.
The only criticism that I could offer about his presentation (I am unfamiliar with his publications) is that I could do without so many attempts at humor (but I sympathize with his need to hold the attention of a bunch of college kids). My own experience studying languages (as opposed to reading about people who study/have studied other languages) is probably much more extensive than his but that makes my observations anecdotal rather than serious research based.
I have experienced the extremes in language acquisition. In the 50's I began my foreign language studies with Latin. For obvious reasons, there was no attempt to learn to speak the language. It was all about grammar and translating into English. Next I took French for a year but I found the spelling almost as difficult(illogical) as English (my pronunciation was good but that counted for nothing on written tests). I switched to Spanish but the teacher spoke nothing but English in the classroom (apart from saying "Buenos días"and "Hasta mañana." and I was expelled from the class for ridiculing a (second generation Spanish speaker) for saying that he wanted to make a comment in English lest everyone not understand (echoing one of the teacher's favorite phrases).
Finally, (in the early 60's) I spent two summers in Mexico. This was my first real exposure to the actual/living language. It made all the difference. Suddenly, the language became a real language for me. During those winters I studied classical Greek and the experience was much like that of Latin. All about grammar and translation into English. Slightly less painful than Latin but I could never really get "into" it.
Then six months in Madrid. I took a course at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (for foreigners) but the primary benefit came from daily life in Madrid.
When I returned to the states, I took a semester in German and an intermediate/advanced course in French. By this time the American education system had shifted away from an emphasis on grammar/translation to a more "conversational" approach. I don't remember any discussions of grammar from the German class. With the French, I had skipped over the basic courses, so I don't know what they were doing.
When I switched majors from maths to Spanish, I just went into the advanced classes so there were no more discussions about the "mechanics" of the language.
In the army, I took a year-long course in Iraqi Arabic at the DLIWC (Defense Language Institute West Coast) and there was never any mention of grammar (or translation, for that matter). This was followed by two years in Viet Nam. I purchased a book for learning Vietnamese but never got past the first two chapters, so it was all unstructured listening to the spoken language.
After the army, I took up Japanese (with a one-semester interlude of studying Mandarin [again, no grammar]). Once again, the emphasis was almost entirely on the spoken language (I'm, basically, illiterate in Japanese although I can carry on a non-technical conversation). .
Krashen also states that students who concentrated on comprehension also did better on grammar tests that those whose studied focused on grammar. I think that this is likely but my personal experience neither supports nor contradicts his thesis.
Partially. I agree with his ideas on comprehensible input being crucial. The more you hear and read that you can understand the more you will be able to understand.
But output with feedback is also important. If you were to follow Krashen's ideas completely you would be able to read and listen very well, but not speak or write too well.
As with everything else in life, you have to practice the thing you want to get good at.
I find many of his ideas very intriguing, not just for learning a foreign language, but for the implications they have on language development and refinement within the framework of one's own native tongue as well.
Aside from Krashen's theories, I also find fascinating some of the models/methods of language acquisition which can rightly be considered offshoots of his original ideas.
Foremost among these, at least in my mind, would have to be the ALG method which is built largely on the ideas of the "listen first" model as proposed by Dr. J. Marvin Brown but which also integrate many of the same ideas proposed by Krashen.
Like Kevin above (and, likewise, in accordance with the ALG method), I also believe that comprehensible input eventually must give way to output (i.e. speaking and writing); however, I also believe that the best way for such skills to develop is through imitation rather than translation. Moreover, developing the ability to naturally imitate the patterns that are found in a given language requires many hours of listening and reading in order to develop the "echo" necessary to be able to spontaneously reproduce and manipulate the language to one's needs.
Aside from these two, the focal skills method developed by Dr Ashley Hastings might also be worth a look if you are not already familiar with these ideas.
Yes, I most definitely agree with his theory.
