Stephen D. Krashen - Language Acquisition - Bilingual Subtitles
Steve Crashing and I'm going to tell you a story.
In fact, I'm going to give you some hard theory about language acquisition through the story.
I can tell you the story and you know everything about the work we've done over the last 50 years.
I live about, oh, 10 miles from the supermarket.
And one time when I went to the there.
There was somebody there who I had never seen before, a new clerk.
I saw his name.
His name was Fidel, and I heard him speak.
So of course, he was my checkout clerk.
I spoke Spanish to him.
Spanish is certainly not my best language is like three or four, but it went okay.
He answered me in English first.
And I found out later that they're instructed to do that, no matter what you've got answer in English.
I said if you doubt to put his thou your darme you can help me Me met the is the blotters by no commolt status.
I want to speak Spanish the way you do Okay,
you and the plural I said, please let's speak Spanish oblimals this by no he loved it We've been speaking Spanish every Friday.
I'd say for the last year and a half when I've been going there I'm better in Spanish now
And I've only been really from actually not.
It's not from talking to Fidel.
I only talked to him for that's not enough.
And I only listened to him talk for about 30 seconds.
He's got other customers, but I am getting better.
I know I'm getting better because it's more, if you know, Spanish, it's more charlotte talking in general, not just a blur, just regular talking.
We gossip a lot.
You know, who was it who said, if you don't have something good to say about somebody, come sit next to me.
There was Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, the famous quote.
We talk about all kinds of things.
It's really fun.
I now, thanks to him, have a reputation at the supermarket.
People think I speak 10 languages.
They come up talk to me in other languages.
It's really fun.
I'm getting better, but it's not from talking to Fidel.
This is not enough time to do it.
When I go home, I've been following the advice of a colleague of mine named Benico Mason.
I've been doing a lot of reading of very, very easy Spanish.
By the way, another reason I know I'm getting better.
I ran into a friend of mine who flew in Spanish from Mexican American.
I spoke to her in Spanish.
She said, Steve, your Spanish is so much better.
What are you Well, I've been going home and reading lots and lots of easy, easy books, books designed for language students.
And they're called graded readers, they're getting better in the last few years, they're gradually becoming literature.
And I'll give you an example of how good they are, one by my favorite author, Adriana Ramirez.
She tells the story of a young man who is in the Bogota visiting and he's looking for a hotel where he's supposed to meet a friend and he gets lost.
And his Spanish isn't very good.
He finds another young man tells him the problem.
They manage to communicate.
He says, I know where you're going.
I'll take you with me.
I'll take you.
they run into two beautiful young ladies.
The beautiful young ladies go up to his new guide, give him hugs, hold his hand, and give him kisses on the cheek.
Oh my god, what's going on here?
Then the new guide introduces the young lady to the narrator of the story.
they hold his hand and give him hugs.
Finally, they reach the hotel, and the new guide says, the guide says, I suppose you're wondering what's going on here?
He says, those girls are my cousins.
And this is the way we are in Bogota, in Colombia.
We're very demonstrative.
It's no surprise that they would give you a So what Ramirez manages to do is teach a little culture and tell an interesting story.
So there is anecdote after anecdote, another one she wrote.
wrote is about a deaf student near deaf,
hard of hearing,
who has trouble in school and how he gets by, how he manages to find a seat where he can read the teacher's lips.
Turns out it's her husband, I found out.
So this is a kind of good literature that's going on.
This is the whole thing.
Let me tell you what I didn't do.
I didn't go home and study Spanish.
I didn't try to talk to people and get my errors corrected.
I didn't make flashcards in vocabulary.
I did it through interesting books that were comprehensible and not just interesting but compelling,
very interesting, where you really want to know what's going to happen next.
And some of these are so good, you forget that you're eating it in another language.
That's my whole theory.
That's it.
We acquire language when we understand it,
when we understand what people tell us, or we understand what we read, and the content is absolutely interesting.
The result of that is being able to speak, being able to write.
Speaking and writing are a result of language.
not a cause.
That is the entire theory.
And over the last 50 years, we've been gathering more and more evidence.
I'm going to give you one of the hundreds of studies that I've either read or been involved with.
By the way, if you want to read them, You can find them all at SDcrashion.com, free download of my books and papers.
I do this not because I'm generous, but because they're all too expensive.
Nobody can afford it.
Otherwise you don't get it out there.
So free to download them.
You may share them with anyone except Donald Trump.
Okay.
So we do this through comprehension.
It's called The ability to produce is the result, one study of the many.
Done by a former student of mine,
face in one of the California State Universities,
she worked with a young lady a secondary school freshman who had been limited in English, but her English was now pretty good.
First language, put the law, that means Mandarin.
Okay.
The school she went to,
the first week they give kids,
everyone who comes to test on reading in English, and they expect that through the year you'll get better and better.
Well, this girl, I call the paper Sophie's Choice.
Got worse over the year.
Her English got worse.
Then she'd go home over the summer, come back in the fall, and her English was better than it was all last year.
She got worse during the year and better, better, better over the summer.
What was she doing over the summer?
She went to the local public library to get out of the heat nice and air conditioned,
found the section on young people's literature in red for pleasure.
Sweet Valley High, okay?
She read detective stories for kids, okay?
Nancy Drew, etc.
These are pretty good books by the way.
I at them.
She read 50 books over the summer when she came back her English was improved even though that wasn't her intention.
That's the kind of study we're coming up with, reading for pleasure, having friends, etc.
A study I found this morning when I was reviewing for today,
getting my notes together,
I found a that I cited years ago,
they found,
they looked at college students or international students at Indiana University,
and they gave them what's called the TOEFL test, the big test of English for them.
and they gave them questionnaires, what do you do all day, etc.
The amount of just plain socializing and speaking English was not a predictor.
The amount of pleasure reading was it's comprehensible, fascinating input, and reading is one of the best ways to get it.
That's a quick look at the last 50 years ago.
life.
This is more to go.
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