Name: Stephen Krashen on Language Acquisition
Uploaded: 2024-12-17T22:33:34.000Z
Duration: 15 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'd like to begin my presentation this afternoon by talking about what I think is the most important issue in language education.

The most important question, and that is, how do we acquire language?

And I'd like to begin this discussion, this presentation, with an outrageous statement.

In my opinion, we all acquire language the same way.

The reason this is an outrageous thing to say is that these days in education, we're living in an age of individual variation.

We're very concerned about how our students are different, not how our students are the same.

Those of you who have been around in the field for a while remember, oh, about 15, 20 years ago, people were very concerned about something called field-dependent learners and field-independent learners.

You give people a certain test, and one group gets this treatment, one group gets the other.

Then about 15 years ago, it was left side of the brain, right side of the brain.

Some people are left-hemisphere thinkers.

Then about 10 years ago, cognitive style.

The cognitive style of the home culture differs from the cognitive style of the school culture.

Well, each of the examples I gave you is probably correct.

There is individual variation, and there is quite a bit of it.

Nevertheless, there are some things we all do the same.

First you put it in your mouth, then you chew it up, then it goes down your throat, then into your stomach.

That's how it's done in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa.

That's how it's done everywhere in the world.

The visual system is the same everywhere.

It's always the occipital lobe in the back of the brain.

It's done exactly the same everywhere you go.

By the way, I used to use sex as an example of things everyone does the same, but some counterexamples have been pointed out to me recently.

Actually, I saw this movie, if you really want to know the truth.

Anyway, we all acquire language the same, and rather than just talk about it, I'd like to show you.

I'd like to take just a couple of minutes and give you some sample language lessons.

I'll use a language that I'm sure you've heard before, and maybe some of you speak, and you can tell me which of these two very brief lessons you like better.

Do you think if I kept talking to you like that, you'd pick up German?

How about if I said it and you repeated it back?

How about if I wrote it out for you and you could see it on your television screen?

How about if I wrote it out for you and you copied it down?

How about if I wrote it out for you and deleted every fifth word and you tried to guess what the word is?

The truth is that none of these things help.

None of these things mean anything, and I hope you can see that now.

And for this, you have to watch me carefully.

Everyone say, ja, I can hear you, even though it's a TV audience.  And here I'll draw a picture now.

I did everything necessary to teach you German.

And now I'm going to share with you the most important thing I have learned about language.

Probably the best kept secret in the profession.

We acquire language in one way, and only one way.

We acquire language when we understand what people tell us.

Comprehensible input, in my opinion, has been the last resort of the language teaching profession.

We've tried grammar teaching, drills and exercises, computers, etc.

But the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand, comprehensible input.

Now one of the reasons lesson number two was better than lesson number one is we had Mr. Spock to help us out.

So anything that helps make input comprehensible.

Pictures, knowledge of the world, realia, etc. helps language acquisition.

If comprehensible input is true, what we call the input hypothesis is true, other things follow from it.

And a very important corollary of the input hypothesis is this.

And this may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Stephen Krashen on Language Acquisition

anxiety

cognitive

individual

situation