Limits to Krashen?

Here is the podcast.Download Krashen challenged

Beniko Mason has some wonderful articles on research on language learning showing that reading is more efficient in language learning than deliberate instruction. I am indebted to Igor the Macedonian for the link.

He will now attack me as I explain why I like to do a little Krashen plus "n". In other words I believe a little speaking and writing and word review, and even a little grammar review, have their place in making the brain more attentive. As long as we do not expect to learn the grammar or the new words, as long as we are not hung up about speaking and writing correctly, these deliberate learning activities help, as long as they do not get in the way of listening and reading.

I also make the point that the interest in the content is more important than making the reading easy. I am not a fan of graded readers, for example, at least for my own learning. A little bit of easy content to start with and then let me at the authentic stuff as soons as possible. I believe that LingQ makes that jump easier, and that is why we developed the system the way we did.

So go ahead Igor, and hit me. I can take it.

Comments

[Alex Case]

You are not only 100% right, but you have explained my attitude to Krashen in far fewer (and far fairer) words than I have ever managed. I don't see how any adult language learner could disagree with you, and yet many language teachers seem to.

I think authentic texts early on work for very motivated and/ or talented language learners who make a conscious effort to supplement that with lots of speaking and listening, which almost inevitably means a lot of investment of time, at least in the short term. For others, gradually ratcheting up the graded readers can be fine, as long as it is motivating (due to being interesting and confidence boosting) rather than demotivating (due to being too easy, babyish, or seen as a sign that they aren't really progressing).

[John Fotheringham]

Well said Alex.

And I think it is important to emphasize the order of operations. Obviously, all four language skills are important, but the focus needs to be on input first (listening & reading), followed by ouput only ONCE YOU'RE READY.

As my friend Antonio Graceffo says, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent." When people begin speaking too soon, they end up forming fossilized errors that are almost impossible to reverse later despite the requisite input.

And for most people, speaking too early also leads to anxiety, frustration and a distaste for language learning. It's like asking a couch potato to do 20 pull-ups. They probably can't do even one (no matter how hard they try) and will usually just give up. But if they build up their strength gradually doing sports, martial arts, or outdoor activities that they enjoy, they'll eventually get strong enough for the pull-ups AND learn to love exercise in the process!

[Emilio]

Hi Steve.

I think the best way to see it to put in perspective.

What if there was a study that tried to test if 100 hours of reading + 1hour of writing
was more effective than 101hours of reading?

I'd be inclined to think that the first choice is the better one. But if we increase these writing hours to 10 or 20, I'd start to like the second choice more.

I've posted about this in my blog some time ago, and I thought maybe you'd like to read.

http://onhowtolearn.blogspot.com/2009/03/input-x-output.html

[Igor the Macedonian]

Hello Steve,

First of all, a huge thank you from me and all the Macedonians around the world for using our real and constitutional name Macedonia, probably you don’t know but there is a dispute between Greece and Republic of Macedonia over the name. Republic of Macedonia borders the region of Greek Macedonia (in which by the way majority of the people are ethnical Macedonians who speak the same language that I do) and because of that, Greece raised the issue of “possible” territorial aspirations from my country. Although USA, Canada, China, Russia etc etc have recognized Macedonia under its constitutional name “Macedonia”, it is still “politically incorrect” in the European Union (which we aspire to join but Greece have put veto) to use it, there are now intensive meetings and fierce debates about the name issue and it’s a great pleasure to have a hand of support. Ok, this already took much space but it’s a sensible issue for me, so a needed to mention it.

Now the fun part.

Here are the few points on which we disagree:

1. Why not a little bit more difficult texts with more unknown words and subsequently slower and more careful reading of texts that are very interesting for the learner but easier texts with not many unknown words and subsequently faster reading speed (100+ words per minute) and for general comprehension like graded readers, graphical novels, easy authentic texts etc?

First, reading easy texts with at least 95% known words encourages the exploitation of textual redundancy. Insights from cognitive psychology have informed our understanding of the way the brain functions in reading. It is now generally understood that slow, word-by-word or lexical item-by-lexical item reading, which is common in classrooms, impedes comprehension by transferring an excess of visual signals to the brain. This leads to overload because only a fraction of these signals need to be processed for the reader to successfully interpret the message (Bell, Timothy “Extensive Reading: Why? and How?”).
Second, graded readers do not have to be by no means, boring, childish or monotone. If you go to any ESL library and browse through the graded readers you will find that they are books as any other normal book for native readers except for the very lowest levels. You just have to take a couple of them, read the first 2-3 pages of each of them and than decide what you like and what you don’t like. If you enjoy so much reading Tolstoy, than great, go and take all the simplifications of his novels, they will most likely be 130 pages instead of 600 but the style is very similar, the story is the same, if you like Bronte, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, again, no problem, there are graded readers of all of those authors. You can and you should ignore the gradation of the readers or their lexile framework, I will not get into this here, there is an article about it (http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/lexile_framework/all.html).
Third, graded readers are absolutely not the only material that can be used for free voluntary reading or extensive reading, sustained silent reading or called it whatever you like. You can also read comics, graphic novels, and easy sections of the newspapers and magazines. You should just “Lower your standards. Read only material in the second language that is genuinely fun and interesting, material that is so easy that you probably feel guilty reading it in your primary language. This is your excuse to read comics, magazines, detective stories, romances, etc. There is no shame in reading translations.” (Krashen, Stephen “The Case for Narrow Reading”).
Fourth, you can absolutely not accelerate the process and get yourself to genuine content faster by using Lingq or any other similar program. Why? Well, let’s do a little, simple counting here. You will agree that in order to read a genuine content you need at least 3000 word families or 5000 lexical items, so if you learn say 15 new words per hour (this thesis may support my claim to a certain extent http://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/vocab/principles/systematic_learning.htm download the word document named thesis) and you need another hour to listen and read repeatedly the text from which you got the new words, that will be 400 hours to learn 3000 words, on the other side you can read 14.400 pages in those 400 hours (150 wpm, quite normal reading speed for a second language learner who reads) and acquire 3600 to 7200 new words (my evidence? :o) http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/reading/practices/redbk5.pdf go to page 11) together with their collocations, nuances and other grammatical aspects. So you say that is better to work with Lingq, Assimil, WithEase, Pimsleur or some other program for 400 hours and learn 3000 words instead of lying down on your back in your bedroom, relax and read interesting material for 400 hours and acquire 3600 to 7200 new words altogether with their grammar? I think I would always take the second option if I were to study a new language.

2. You need some output and grammar explanations to make your brain “more attentive”.

We do not learn a word from one encounter. Research tells us that it takes between 5-16 encounters (or more) to "learn" an average word (e.g. Nation, 1990, p. 41). So what happens if you try to use a word or a phrase before you have met it enough times, 5-10-15 times? “Aha! I found a gap in my knowledge.” Steve would say. “Now I will be more attentive and repair it”. No Steve, you just have to relax, continue reading and all the gaps will disappear before you even notice their existence :o). Look at the lower intermediate language learners, their language skills are “full of gaps” what would happen if they stop every time they encounter a gap to repair it? They will end up so concerned with the accuracy of what they read, listen or say that they will quit reading and listening altogether. So if lower intermediates should just get input and progress than why should the rest of us worry? Just relax and let the input work to its full potential. I already have mentioned this to you earlier about your Russian, actually I said to you to acquire enough Russian words and grammar (8000 with their grammar) and then try to find gaps (I bet you won’t find much), you answered to me that you have learned enough Russian words and you still have some gaps. The problem here is that you have “learned” those thousands of words and have not “acquired” them, and that’s the prize that you have to pay for your slow, attentive reading of short texts, your knowledge of those few thousand word families is more superficial that it would be if you acquire them by extensive reading, the situation with the Russian grammar is probably even worse, you can’t acquire many of the Russian cases if you don’t really read. To support my claims I could ask you only one simple question: Why is it that you don’t have many problems with English, French and Japanese language and you have gaps in your Russian, German etc? The answer is that you have learned the first three in the countries where they are spoken so while you were occupied by intentionally learning them and bunch of other things in your daily life “a quiet miracle” has happened, “YOU ACQUIRED THEM”, acquired by means of extensive listening (the little sister of extensive reading) i.e. by all the uncontrolled speech around you that you were listening, consciously or not and your studies were just a supplement to it, not vice versa. If you don’t believe me you can try it by yourself, knowing that you already have enough Russian words to read extensively, take a few Russian books from 1, 2 or maybe 3 authors that you enjoy but not less than 5000 pages altogether and simply read them like you read in English, forget that you are learning Russian. After you finish it I bet in my beloved second language acquisition book collection that your Russian skills will be better than your Japanese. After all it looks to me like a witch hunting :o), we create problems intentionally, just to fight them.

3. Lingq.

What to say. At a first glance, it seems to me like a lovely system, invented by linguist with not much theoretical knowledge, but a linguist with a lot of practical knowledge and most important a linguist not out of touch with reality like many of the applied linguists at the universities. This linguist with a little luck and lots of careful planning have created this Lingq system, which after all is much, much better than similar programs like Assimil, Pimsleur or FSI.
But, after all said and done previously why do we need Lingq? Simple answer would be we don’t need it, BUT this world is not an ideal world, there are enough graded readers and tapes of those readers only for a few big world languages and what should we do now, we want to read extensively in some language but we don’t have readers, there is a gap. We need a program that will help us learn the first 3000 most common words so we can start reading and listening extensively. My recommendation for everyone that would like to learn new language is to come to Lingq, it’s cleverest, cheapest, and most interesting language learning program that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot, most of the Assimil and FSI courses, LanguageNow, Pimsleur, With Ease series…), for some small cash you can get from scratch to 3000 words level in 100 to 400 hours depending on the language, BUT as soon as you get there you should put Lingq aside and start reading and listening extensively, after certain point this program will become more of a burden than help for your studies, or simply put, until now you have crawled from now on you’ll walk.

Now about the points on which we agree:

1. Language teaching industry.
You have the blog and I don’t, so you have to be diplomat and I don’t, so I feel very free to say: it’s a SCANDAL.

At the end, I apologize for this lengthy comment, but this is the shortest I could do without compromising the content and creating confusion.

P.S.

I like that word “Krashenite” very much, but I warn you, once you get infected by “Krashenitis” you just have to become “Krashenite” in its strongest version sooner or later. I have become sooner and Beniko Mason has become later, you can read about that on her website in “Interview by Ken Schmidt”, how during the long years of her career she started like an opponent to many of Krashen’s hypotheses and end up like a “hardcore” supporter after years of research.

Greetings from Macedonia,

Igor Efremov

goonersmacedonia@gmail.com

[Steve Kaufmann]

Wow!!

Give me some time to digest this but thanks for putting the time into to it and sharing.

Re Macedonia. Countries should be free to call themselves what they want. I think countries should be proud of their history, but I have always had an aversion to historical arrogance. My people are better than yours because 1,000 or 5,000 years ago we did this and you did not. You know what I mean.

Live and let live is my motto, but arguments are OK!

[John Fotheringham]

Thank you for an eloquent post Igor. You have a sharp mind and make some very good points. I'm glad that the hostility has abated.

I agree that much of the language teaching industry is scandalous, but there are many well-intentioned people and products out there, too. I think there is place for language teachers, but not the traditional role of "teaching" (as languages cannot be taught or learned consciously.)

Teachers should:
1) pump students up and help build a cultural context for the target language,
2) lead by example by learning foreign languages themselves including the native language of their students (though this language should not be used much in the classroom of course), and
3) help students find interesting and appropriately difficult materials. First of all, most students don't know where to look, how to look, or what to look for! For example, some of my lower level students here in Taipei used to spend a lot of time listening to the local English radio station (of which they understood virtually nothing) hoping that something would eventually stick. After introducing podcasts to them (which most people have still never heard of!), they now listen to and read appropriately difficult content on topics of THEIR interest every chance they get.

The first day of class, I teach students how to download podcasts, add lyrics to MP4 files in iTunes, useful iPod Touch apps for language learning,and of course, suggested podcasts (BusinessWeek for upper level business students, Ted Talks for people interested in technology, art, design, science, etc.) As the saying goes, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."

Lastly, I do agree that conscious study of vocabulary or grammar does not lead to fluency, but such study CAN be interesting for some learners and interest trumps all! The key is that most reading about the grammar of a language should be done in the L2 itself!

[Igor the Macedonian]

John,
your views on teacher's role in language learning is very similar to that of Amorey Gethin. In his work "The Fraud of the Global English-Teaching Industry"(you can find it here http://www.lingua.org.uk/geifr.html) he proposes to transform the teachers to "language guides", student would meet for two hours a week with his/her guide. The guides would be able to help a far greater number of different individuals than private teachers can at the moment. And the lower cost of guidance would put it within the means of millions more people. This would increase the demand for guides (teachers) instead of throwing them out of work.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Thanks John for this thoughtful comment. Your students are lucky.

Igor, thanks for the link to the Gethin site. When I have more time I will reply with a video.

Keep up the fight. "Language learners of the world wake up, you have nothing to lose but your chains,and everything to gain." Karl Marx (slightly paraphrased).

[riggs]

John F.,
Based on your statements of 2:24 PM, you obviously have good understanding and skill in teaching English as a Second Language and in language acquisition. I agree with most of what you say. You give the impression of maybe overusing technology, but whatever helps your students with it may be good. I also believe that explanations of grammar could be a little elaborate for higher level students but should be not used for beginning students, and you are right about using only the target language for any explanations.

[Alex Case]

"When people begin speaking too soon, they end up forming fossilized errors that are almost impossible to reverse later despite the requisite input"

I've never heard these two things linked before and it certainly can't be based on L1 learners as children have a silent period but still make errors (or interlanguage if you prefer, overgeneralisations etc) when they do begin speaking and therefore experimenting with the language. It would also mean that people moving abroad would be at a grammatical accuracy disadvantage because they had to speak to survive from day one, which seems counterintuitive. Any research or personal experiences I can shock the teachers' room with on that one?

My other objection to a silent period in L2 learners is that in the real classroom situation of most people, a "silent period" would mean the teacher droning on, grammar exercises, watching films they don't understand etc. It is much easier to make a communicative classroom (here meaning with lots of student speaking) fun and therefore motivating, and therefore I would sell that idea as more likely to be a positive influence on the still overwhelmingly grammar translation world we live in. For more or less that reason, I support the Japanese government in banning their poorly trained and grammar translation taught primary school English teachers from teaching any reading and writing at all, at least until they are properly trained

Fascinating discussion, keep it coming!

[John Fotheringham]

@Steve

Thank you for your kind words. I am the one who is lucky; I've been blessed with many motivated students who are willing to try a new approach to learning.

@ Igor

Thank you for linking to Amorey Gethin's fantastic article. It is good to know that others are fighting the good fight. I really like his ideas, especially the "language guide" concept. When myself or others criticize the language teaching industry, we're always met with "But what about the teachers? Do you want to put them out of work?" Amorey answers this question nicely: "Almost certainly more, not fewer, 'English' guides would be needed."

@ Riggs

Thank you. I admit that I am a techno-evangelist, but I also know that technology can't solve all our problems (and often just creates new headaches). That said, I do believe that we are approaching a perfect ed tech storm: 1) affordable, high-quality devices, + 2) cheap and fast bandwidth, +3) free content on every imagineable topic available for download. As I mentioned in my SlideShare.com presentation, "I don't have time" and "I can't afford it" are no longer valid excuses for not learning a language.

@ Alex

It is my belief (and personal experience) that people moving abroad before having some grounding in the language through extensive listening and reading ARE "at a grammatical accuracy disadvantage because they have to speak to survive from day one." Don't get me wrong; I am all for moving to foreign lands to master the local language (I've now lived in 3 foreign countries). But each time I have deboarded the plane with at least a modicum of input prior to arrival. In the case of Japanese (my strongest foreign tongue), I spent 4 years acquiring the language before moving to Japan. This preparation made all the difference. With Mandarin, on the other hand, I arrived in Taiwan with very little input under my belt (other than already being able to read the Chinese characters also used in Japanese) and ended up developing some bad pronunciation and grammar habits that have been hard to fix. This problem is especially pronounced during simple, daily communicative tasks like taking taxis, ordering food, etc. that I've had to do since day 1. Interestingly, I DON'T have the same kind of errors when speaking about more complex ideas since the language I use in such contexts comes from 3 years of input since arriving. Incidentally, most of my meaningful input comes from podcasts, blogs, comic books, novels, and LingQ, NOT everyday life as one may expect.

This concept is only counterintuitive if you subscribe to the "we learn to speak through speaking" idea that has been highly criticized by Krashen et al.

I understand your concerns about a silent period in the classroom, but this just reinforces the need for a language education revolution. We teachers need to stop teaching and start guiding and motivating. Nowhere does this lead to (nor necessitate) falling back to grammar translation. But we also need to let go of trendy monickers like the "communicative approach" that are often no more than marketing band-aids applied to sickly language teaching methods.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Re silent period.

My own experience is that a lengthy silent period is required but need not be a matter of dogma. I spent 18 months essentially silently learning Russian on my own. I had no need and no desire to speak to anyone.

When I moved to Japan I had to learn the language on the spot and on my own. I spent most of my time listening and reading, using whatever material I could find that had word lists. I did speak from time to time, and I do not feel that this hurt me. In fact, a little speaking helps to point out gaps, sort of primes the pump, but it is definitely not a major activity. Even when with Japanese, I mostly listened.

The problem is the classroom or the need to find activities to amuse the learners in the class. Just let them read and listen in the class. Or discuss vocabulary and structures in the class, but mostly with the teacher explaining in the target language.

Ultimately the guide approach with one tutor serving hundreds of learners is the most sensible. Hence LingQ. The problem is that most learners are used to the classroom and need the pressure or coercion that the classroom provides.

[Maite]

"It would also mean that people moving abroad would be at a grammatical accuracy disadvantage because they had to speak to survive from day one, which seems counterintuitive. Any research or personal experiences I can shock the teachers' room with on that one?"

I wanted to mention this as well. I've had to speak right away (in two cultures) OR live a marginal existance within the English-speaking community. I don't really buy the silent period idea unless one has the luxury to stay at home and absorb, absorb, absorb.

I would not say that I am qualifed to interpret at the UN, but I can mangage a fluent conversation in four languages, and communicate in a few other languages to a lesser extent. I don't have the answers for everyone, but I have an idea about what works for me, so I am always interested in people who either push some language theory or claim to speak multiple languages. For me the proof is easy. Can the person who has a language theory back it up by speaking several languages himself/herself or is it simply a charismatic teacher with a theory and many followers?

[Steve Kaufmann]

I agree that this extreme silent period approach is over the top and impractical. People will want or need to speak at different times in their learning. How do you prevent them from speaking?

I think it is more useful to say that the emphasis at first should be on listening and reading and vocabulary accumulation. Speaking is not such an important part of the learning process at first, and therefore mistakes made when speaking are not only normal but not particularly important. Even when speaking as a beginner, we are mostly listening, or should be.

[Igor]

After all if you start speaking somebody might answer to you and than you got input.

Have you guys heard about "The Din in the Head hypothesis"?

The Din in the Head, first noted by Barber (1980), is an involuntary mental rehearsal of a language that occurs after we have had extensive comprehensible input in that language. De Bot states that the "Din in the Head" hypothesis relates to the idea of a "critical stage that turns receptive knowledge into productive knowledge."

[Kerry]

Personally, having got a reasonable handle on pronunciation in German, I found that reading aloud to myself helped me read more challenging texts. By reading aloud I found it easier to skip over words I didn't know and just 'absorb' the gist of the sentences. As pointed out in one of the comments above, reading word by word can overload the brain - so perhaps reading out aloud and focusing on pronunciation and rhythm as I do is a way of shifting the brain from reading at the word level to the sentence level. This is sort of hard to explain, but it seems to be working for me. Has anyone else found this?

[Alex Case]

"We teachers need to stop teaching and start guiding and motivating"

Absolutely, but "we teachers" who are fluent in English, trained, enthusiastic and interested in linguistics will always be a tiny minority of the people teaching English all over the world. As more and more countries introduce English at primary level, most people's first lessons will be with someone who has little if any training specifically as an English teacher and probably very little English.

Re the silent period, I studied French for years on my own in totally the wrong way and probably ruined all chances of ever speaking it well, e.g. only able to use the past tense that is used in literature (I forget the name). How can you pick up functional language without living somewhere? And if you can pick up functional language by living somewhere, why would any other type of language be more difficult to pick up in that situation? What could be a factor is perhaps concentrating too much on communicating when you get there and then fossilizing at a level where you can communicate well but still make loads of mistakes and have a thick accent, but I don't think the ability to get past that has much to do with what you do before. In Spanish I went well past that level despite not knowing a word when I arrived in Spain due to an over the top motivation to at last learn a useful language and an interest in Spanish language literature. In Japanese I almost got to JPLT Level 1, and then realised that all the stuff I was reading and listening to in Japanese was stuff I wouldn't bother with if it was in English and so lost it and slipped back (although my idiomatic speech and accent improved more once I gave up reading)

[Kriss]

This idea of having a Silent Period and its relationship with Fossilization in the L2 is quite interesting. I emailed with the owner of ALG (Automatic Language Growth) School in Thailand, David Long, once and he told me that all language students in the program are instructed to not speak or even think about the language they are learning until speech emerges on its own. The students who don't keep this rule and speak before they are ready, have problems with fossilizing and fluency. According to him the ones who keep the silent period generally can develop native-like fluency and speed after so many hundred hours of listening. I was wonding if anyone else had any comments about the connection between early speaking and internalizing errors and fossilization. Thanks for all the interesting posts!

[reineke]

Culling 470 pages from the original will do a lot of damage to the book, retelling the story will usually kill it. Similar style? To that of Tolstoy? I am not against graded readers (which may contain exclusively authentic texts) I dislike adapted texts.

The word frequency figures and subsequent research also speak against extensive reading in general, including the use of graded readers in the manner you suggest:

“But this is hardly applicable to beginning second language learners; for the subjects of this study, encountering one million words would entail reading fifty graded readers the size of The Mayor of Casterbridge - a worthy but unattainable goal for most learners at this level.”

…The present study suggests that the power of incidental acquisition may have been overestimated. The findings support Meara's (1988) argument that since reading in a second language takes a great deal of time, few learners are able to read in sufficient volume to make it the vocabulary enriching experience it has proved to be for first language learners…

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/cv/Casterbridge.html

There is a collection of excerpts about incidental learning, word frequency, extensive reading etc. with links on my uh, blog. Some of them are here:

http://learnalanguageortwo.blogspot.com/2009/04/word-frequency-and-incidental-learning.html

There are also other factors to consider, including the emotive factor (where even one encounter can be sufficient) and the type of text one is reading.

In a running text of one million words some very useful and “basic” words may appear only once or not appear at all. If you stick only with literature and spurn “Newsweek” like you did in another post you’re increasing the likelihood of some encounters but also seriously decreasing others. Choosing modern literature over the classics also changes the types of encounters.

Some 20-25 "average" novels would equal 10,000 pages, 120,000 sentences or 2.5 million words. So looking at these numbers alone and your suggested necessary repetitions (which is also a disputed range) some 14,400 pages would be entirely insufficient to achieve 5-16 repetitions and make a dent solely through extensive reading. As a side comment, beginners usually don’t read at 150 wpm in a foreign language.

“We suggest that the rate of incidental vocabulary learning is not simply related to the raw frequency of specific words in the language. We further propose that learning is a consequence of noticing and the conscious learning of words that are important in the narrative. (Schmidt, 2001).“

This would support Steve's idea about the “noticing” of words and constructions.

In short, you haven’t figured it out. No one really has.

[David Martin]

@Kriss

How funny that you mentioned Automatic Language Growth! That was exactly my intention after I watched Steve's video and started to read this thread.

Have you read the article 'Learning Languages like Children' from the archives on the ALG website? (http://www.algworld.com/archives.php) In it, Dr. J. Marvin Brown, the founder of the ALG program, talks about the theory behind the Silent Period in language learning, which I firmly believe in.

Also, the idea of Crosstalk, a conversation between teacher and student where each is speaking in his or her native language, is quite fascinating, in that it allows the learner (actually, LEARNERS, as both the teacher and student would be learning from comprehensible and interesting input in this situation) to focus more on the message (input) and less on the form of his or her output, as Krashen suggests. (YouTube video demonstration - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5lRxXobY2E)

Using Crosstalk, students can get to the point where they can understand and take part in advanced conversations in L2 without having to worry about expressing themselves in L2 until they've had enough input to be able to do so with relative ease, and thus without internalizing errors (fossilizing)- as John Fotheringham quoted linguist and author Antonio Graceffo saying above 'Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent'.

I know from experience that learners fossilize mistakes when they start speaking too early, especially those who are monitor under-users, as Krashen calls them. My Estonian girlfriend, for example, who is a C1/C2 (advanced) level speaker on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, but definitely a monitor under-user, still makes the same basic mistakes that she picked up at the beginning of her classroom language learning, whereas she has no problem with advanced expressions and constructions she just picked up watching lots of English TV.

Obviously Crosstalk requires that teachers at the very least understand the language of their students, but, as JF said, this would be a good way to 'lead by example' and also just recognize the importance/validity of their L1.

Also, check out this YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEhFCbn8f1c), where Antonio Graceffo explains the ALG second language acquisition theory.

I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on the subject!

[Igor]

@ reineke,

Of course you will have to sacrifice little something in order to read graded readers, you do the same by reading the Tolstoy in the original don't you think so, frequent stops, re-readings, looking up new words etc. Where's the story there? You'll be lucky if you finish the first chapter only.
I know the study "The Mayor of Casterbridge" very well and I also know few experts who assure us that they are an extensive reading advocates but they use every opportunity in their researches to prove just the opposite by doing biased, "loaded for unsuccess" studies. You took one of the most pessimistic studies if not the most pessimistic one. Now we can argue couple of days if that's correct or not but instead of that I will present to you right away another study, complete opposite of the study that you've presented, a very optimistic one, it's a study by Saragi, Nation and Meister (1978), in this study, native speakers of English read a whole novel, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, which contains a large number of Russian-based "nadsat" words devised by the author. Scores on a surprise posttest showed that participants were able to correctly identify the meanings of most of the nadsat items. The mean number of words acquired was 68.4, amounting to about three quarters of the 90 words tested. So they reported that subjects given a few days to read the book and no warning of a test scored an average of 67%, with the lowest score of 50% and highest of 96%.
96% of the total unknown words learned!
So if some experts claim that "the power of incidental acquisition may have been overestimated", some other experts claim the total opposite that "the power of incidental acquisition may have been underestimated" and you should not accept any of them like they are an axiom, they are just hypothesis.

I completely agree that there are also other factors to consider, including the emotive factor (where even one encounter can be sufficient) and the type of text one is reading.

About your side comment that "beginners usually don’t read at 150 wpm in a foreign language", yes it's true, they read 100-150 words per minute, anything below 100 wpm will simply not be an extensive reading, and it doesn't take much to reach 150 wpm, look at Bell, Timothy "EXTENSIVE READING: SPEED AND COMPREHENSION" The Reading Matrix Vol. 1, No. 1, April 2001; in his study the group of elementary learners of English in Sana'a, Yemen, have increased their reading speed from average 68.10 wpm to average 127.53 wpm after two semesters and some barely 1000 pages of text read and the better students have increased their speed even to 156; 160.5; 164 wpm, so yes, if you're very enthusiastic about your language studies even 150 wpm is a reasonable figure.

And last, I also completely agree with you that "I haven’t figured it out. No one really has.", these figure must be treated with caution, they are rough at best, but there are some other things that makes me confident in it like the fact that a typical American seventh grader knows the meanings of 10-15 words today that she didn't know yesterday. She must have acquired most of them as a result of reading, because: a) the majority of English words are used only in print, b) she already knew well almost all of the words she would have encountered in speech, and c) she learned less than one word by direct instruction.
And of course there is my personal experience with free voluntary reading that shows me the same and makes me even more optimistic. I really did it this way with success in Italian, Spanish and French, and it was a piece of cake in Russian because of the great similarities with my native tongue Macedonian.

[Igor]

Oops, I forgot the "Newsweek" issue,

"If you stick only with literature and spurn “Newsweek” like you did in another post you’re increasing the likelihood of some encounters but also seriously decreasing others. Choosing modern literature over the classics also changes the types of encounters."

I would just postpone newspapers and magazines for later using the narrow reading approach, actually I would go like this:

1.Start with only one author and read his books until I feel pretty comfortable, than,
2.Choose another author with similar style or subject and profit from the overlap of vocabulary and grammar,
3.than 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th...
at some point I would feel that most of the authors are comprehensible enough to me and I have lost "the first few pages effect" (foreign language students, reading a novel in the foreign language, often report that they find the first few pages of a new author's work tough going) and than I would,
4.do a "survey" i.e. jump from topic to topic, from author to author and now is the best time for newspapers, magazines etc, which are written by many authors and contain many topics.

[reineke]

@Igor

I think it's fair to ention that the Mayor of Casterbridge experiment is mentioned in the study entitled "Beyond A Clockwork Orange: Acquiring Second Language Vocabulary through Reading."

Some excerpts:

"Unfortunately, the experimental support for incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading in a second language is weak and plagued by methodological flaws....

The first study claiming to show that second language vocabulary learning occurs incidentally through reading is a well known experiment by Saragi, Nation and Meister (1978). They tested native speakers of English who had read Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange on their understanding of many of the Russian-based slang words that occur in the novel. They found that the subjects were able to correctly identify the meanings of most these nadsat words on a surprise multiple-choice test , especially the frequently occurring ones. But it seems strange to equate the circumstances of this study with second language learning. Here, native speakers of English used contexts which they must have fully understood to infer, for example, that droog meant friend; but making such connections is probably much harder for readers in a foreign language for whom many words in the context may be unknown or only partially known...

The mean number of words subjects acquired in the experiment was 68.4, amounting to about three quarters of the 90 words tested. But replications of this study with second language learners have not managed to reproduce these impressive results (see Table 1 below). For instance, Pitts, White and Krashen (1989) report a mean score of just two nadsat words correctly identified after subjects read A Clockwork Orange for an hour and took a test on 30 items. Other studies using a Clockwork methodology (Day, Omura & Hiramatsu 1991, Hulstijn 1992) report similar gains of just one, two or three words. Dupuy and Krashen (1993) report a larger gain of almost seven words, but this higher than usual result may have little to do with reading since their experiment also involved viewing a video..."

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/cv/Casterbridge.html

[Igor]

@ reineke

"The studies investigated the vocabulary gains of school age English speaking subjects reading short texts in their native language. In the 1985 study by Nagy et al., eighth-grade participants read one of two 1000-word texts each containing 15 unfamiliar words. After reading the text, they were tested on their knowledge of 30 words, 15 from the text they had read and 15 from the other text which they had not read. Comparisons of the reading and non-reading conditions indicated that participants picked up knowledge of new word meanings as a result of exposure to the experimental texts. Mean gains were very small, on the order of two or three words, but were found to be statistically significant.
Extrapolating from these findings, Nagy and his colleagues determined that the probability that a subject will be able to produce a full definition of a word that he or she has encountered once in a reading passage amounts to 10 percent. They calculated that the chances of being able to recognize a correct definition in a multiple-choice format are 15 percent. In other words, about every tenth encounter with an unfamiliar word in a reading text can be said to result in a learning event. Nagy and his colleagues go on to consider what this might mean in numbers of words acquired in a year. They estimate that the typical school age child reads about 1 million words per year. By applying their probabilities to this approximation and estimates of how often unknown words would occur, they arrive at growth figures of 3125 to 4875 words per year (Nagy et al., 1985, p. 250). These figures coincide rather neatly with prior estimates based on what would have to be achieved on a yearly basis in order to arrive at an adult-sized vocabulary. Thus, their vocabulary learning results appear to give substance to the claims of the default position."

"However, none of the L2 studies we are aware of follow Nagy et al. (1985) in reporting incidental vocabulary gains in terms of probabilities. That is, they do not draw on findings to arrive at conclusions about the chances of new words being picked up incidentally by L2 readers. But it is possible to use the numbers of words tested in the studies and the mean gains reported to calculate the probability of tested word being picked up incidentally. Probabilities can then be expressed as pick-up rates. We analyzed five experiments following this procedure; the results are shown in Table 1.1 with approximate pick-up rates appearing in the last column. The rates range from 1 word correctly identified per 5 tested to 1 per 17. Taken together, the incidental word learning gains reported in these studies suggest that adult L2 learners pick up about 1 new word in 8. Thus, the L2 pick-up rate appears to be broadly consistent with the 1-in-10 rate (Nagy et al., 1985) established for L1 learners."

"adult L2 learners pick up about 1 new word in 8"

"Thus, the L2 pick-up rate appears to be broadly consistent with the 1-in-10 rate (Nagy et al., 1985) established for L1 learners"

[Igor]

http://www.lextutor.ca/text_encounters/

Chapter 1

[reineke]

@ Igor

Beyond A Clockwork Orange:

"Nagy, Herman and Anderson (1985) propose that for children learning English as their first language, school reading can account for the acquisition of thousands of new words each year. Even though the incidental pick-up rate was found to be low, large gains occur, they argue, because children encounter millions of words annually. But this is hardly applicable to beginning second language learners; for the subjects of this study, encountering one million words would entail reading fifty graded readers the size of The Mayor of Casterbridge - a worthy but unattainable goal for most learners at this level.”
“The results of this study point to several things. Firstly, the data support the notion that words can be learned incidentally from context. However, these data suggest that few new words appear to be learned from this type of reading, and half of those that are learned are soon lost....Assuming an optimistic scenario in which reading fifty novels per year was possible, at the rate of five words per novel established in this study, annual gain would amount to only 250 words. At this rate, even if yearly gains increased marginally with increased vocabulary size, it would take many years to acquire incidentally the 5,000 words most frequent word families of English, the figure which has been proposed as the minimum knowledge base needed for learners of English to be able to infer the meanings of new words they encounter in normal, unsimplified texts (Hirsh & Nation 1992, Laufer 1989)... Since most learners have a limited amount of time to devote to second language acquisition, vocabulary growth needs to proceed more rapidly."

[Igor]

@ reineke,

http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num1/pdf/mcquillan.pdf

COMMENTARY: CAN FREE READING TAKE YOU ALL THE WAY? A RESPONSE TO COBB (2007)
Jeff McQuillan
Center for Educational Development
Stephen D. Krashen
University of Southern California

"Table 4. Average Reading Rates of L2 Readers"
-''-
"It should be noted that these studies probably underestimate reading rates achieved during free reading. The texts used to determine reading rate in all cases were selected by the researcher, and thus may have been too difficult for the reader or on a topic about which the reader lacked sufficient background knowledge. It seems likely that students engaged in free reading, where the text is self-selected and thus probably a closer fit for the reader’s proficiency and background knowledge, would read at a faster rate. It is clear from Table 4 that L2 reading rates vary widely, with more proficient readers reading faster than less proficient ones. We conservatively choose 100 wpm as an average reading rate for our analysis, which is slightly below the average rate for readers at a beginning level of L2 reading proficiency for the studies included here (106.8 wpm)."

So 1 000 000 words = 10 000 min = 167 hours = 365 days x 27.4 min per day

is this really "a worthy but unattainable goal for most learners at this level"???

[Igor]

Here are the good guys:

"Beyond raw frequency: Incidental vocabulary acquisition in extensive reading"
Soo-Ok Kweon + Hae-Ri Kim

"Extensive Reading: A Simple Technique with Outstanding
Results"
Thomas KOCH

"Extensive Reading - Another way of preparing Dutch secondary school students for final examinations"
Nicole Sijbrandij

"IN PRAISE OF INCIDENTAL LEARNING"
Warwick B. Elley

even Rob Waring is here!

"Why Extensive Reading should be an indispensable part of all language programs"
Rob Waring

[reineke]

One million words is about 10 literary novels of about 300 pages each. Too much? For some learners perhaps. This is however not really the problem. Little native speakers encounter millions of words annually and they embark on the task with native-level skills and a core vocabulary.

The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English

The corpus contains 1,014,312 words sampled from 15 text categories.

"The" constitutes nearly 7% of the Brown Corpus. About half of the total vocabulary of about 50,000 words are words that occur only once in the corpus.

[Igor]

OK, they begin to read with about 5000 word families in the 1st grade and go up to 12 000 in 8th grade (http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html), you will begin with active minimum of some 1000 word families and go up to 8000, so there are 7000 word families to acquire anyway.

[Igor]

Ha-ha-ha, pardon me, I'm talking about the subject with a friend from Russia too and now he said something very funny about this, that is: "Так за 1 000 000 слов-то и медведь читать научится..." it's something like: "After 1 000 000 words even a bear will learn to read..."
Crazy guy.

[Milan]

This is an excellent post and I enjoyed it. Thanks.

[reineke]

Native language input. No published studies that I'm aware of but one estimate comes up with 2.3 million words per month. The foreign language learner would need more than 24 years in order to match one year of native-level input.

http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2007/07/idioms-interpreting-frequencies.html

[Igor]

2.3 million words per month? Hummm...

According to that article:

"The recent Mehl paper in Science suggests that we speak on average something like 16,000 words per day. Presumably, we're doing much of that in conversation with others, often more than one person, so let's put our conversational word count at 40,000 per day spoken and heard.
Then there's TV. I don't have average numbers, but after looking at a few transcripts, it looks like 7,000 words per hour might be a reasonable estimate. According to Neilson, the average American spends 4.5 hours per day watching TV, so we can add another 30,000 words or so to our count, which now totals 70,000."
"I have no data on how much people write, but I suspect it's very little. In terms of reading, I can find no adult data, but 5th-grade children read about 5,300 words per day, bringing our total daily word exposure to roughly 75,300 or 2,290,000 words per month."

Now I agree that 5th-grade children read about 5,300 words per day, it's a very good estimation but "40,000 per day spoken and heard"? What are we? Retired aunties who don't have anything else to do but chit-chat whole day? And even if it's true still that is simple colloquial speech made up of very little words and phrases repeated thousands of times during the day (1/10 of the total vocabulary or some 1200 most common colloquial words). Also it's a good estimation that the average American spends 4.5 hours per day watching TV, I met that figure many times in a many different sources during the last few years, but 7,000 words per hour is not a reasonable estimate at all, what do you think, why are people watching so much TV? Because it requires so little attention and concentration and most of the context is presented visually, and again even if 7,000 words per hour is correct which I truly doubt, still most of it is simple, repetitive colloquial speech used in the dialogues of the popular movies and series.
So again it boils down to something that I already said:
"a typical American seventh grader knows the meanings of 10-15 words today that she didn't know yesterday. She must have acquired most of them as a result of reading, because: a) the majority of English words are used only in print, b) she already knew well almost all of the words she would have encountered in speech, and c) she learned less than one word by direct instruction."
Or,
only those 5,300 words per day that children read are useful input with enough new words that children will learn, because the majority of English words are used only in print, the rest of it is speech and he/she already know well almost all of the words he/she would encounter in speech.

So you better try about 160 000 words per month and maybe 2.3 million words per year.

[reineke]

"Some 150/160 words per minute is the industry standard for most voiceovers and verbatim closed captioning of sitcoms and similar programs.

The problem with movie and sitcom scripts is that they contain a lot of words that are never spoken on screen. A 52 minute episode of a US drama had shrunk from 9,300 words to a little over 4,500 words after all the instructions for the actors were removed. A 22-minute episode of the Addams Family was a little over 2,200 words long after all the extra stuff was removed."

My own words and wordcount.

http://learnalanguageortwo.blogspot.com/2009/04/corpus-size-word-frequency-and.html

TV vs reading comparison by word frequency

http://learnalanguageortwo.blogspot.com/2009/04/corpora-comparison-by-frequency.html

Apologies for plugging my blog, I am not aware of anyone else doing this type of research.

As for the 16,000 words figure, it comes from a respectable scientific study. They followed college students and this is a very good representative group (for our purposes) since they're still learning and in constant social interaction. A morose working adult would certainly have a lower word count. Maybe the guys they were following were Krashen enthusiasts, I don't know, but they were certainly not retired aunties.

[Igor]

OK reineke,

we can go on with this debate to infinity and beyond but having in mind that Steve is absent for a few days and is unable to moderate here, let's stop before it becomes a little bit boring to other readers of this blog.
I know your blog from before and I know your reasons for being suspicious about incidental learning of vocabulary apart from the studies that you've presented here. In your post "The TV "method" or how I learned Italian" you explain how you've learned Italian "from (seemingly) "incomprehensible" input". I understand your experience, feelings, conclusions in learning Italian simply because almost completely the same thing happened to me too, except that the language was not Italian. I started on the same age, did the same things, enjoyed, enjoyed, enjoyed. Many years later I've learned enough of SLA theory and tried to implement it in practice and the results were very encouraging. I learned how to "tune" my input by implementing narrow input, more comprehensible materials and bunch of other things mentioned previously, the result was that I accomplished the same job as with my first foreign language but tenfold more efficiently (which made me even angry at that time :)), I spend maybe 10 000 hours watching TV in English but achieved the same effect now in Russian with only 500 hours and almost the same effect in Italian with 1000 hours. I'm very glad to finally have exchange with somebody who have studied this in depth. That's it from me.

Peace

[reineke]

I was not aware that Steve was away. I do not wish to self-moderate. I don’t believe we have been confrontational or in any manner impolite. My last blog post is a work in progress. I intend to edit – also for self-reference. It was not easy to determine the level of competence and the learning curve. The initial impression was that “it took an awful long time”. I determined that it was pretty quick, very intensive and that later I perhaps reached a plateau.

I am not suspicious or even negative about incidental learning. I have simply been playing a sort of argument-counterargument football game with you. Some of your stuff has been, if I may notice, point-seeking rhetoric and twisting of facts. The other side has some very valid arguments. I don’t believe these people are any more evil than Krashen. I also don’t believe you were able to produce anything of substance against their conclusions. I do not wish to bury someone's argument simply because I may not agree with it or with the final conclusion. I do not subscribe to any language learning mantra. I also have a bone or two to pick with Steve but I've never felt the need to hound him about it. I have however thoroughly enjoyed our little exchange.

I managed to successfully “pick up” at least one foreign language without any active study. My idea of fluency revolves around professional competence and high proficiency. I wish to change my "input" strategy in order to accelerate things a bit with German. I believe I may actually bring in the heavy guns (eek, Steve, close your eyes – GRAMMAR!). I have also studied languages formally. I have mixed feelings about all of my language learning experiences. Unlike you I don't have a ready formula (I thought you admitted no one had figured it out yet). BTW, I like a lot of the things you have to say. This also goes for Steve.

Previously you complained about “hard” authentic texts vs. simplified readers. Now you’re complaining that TV is mostly simple, repetitive colloquial speech. TV programming consists of more than just movies and sitcoms represented in the Subtlexus database. Actually, the idiot box is a very rich source of very important vocabulary. The visual aspect is very important to figure out the meaning. You will often be bombarded simultaneously by text, image and human voice. Commercials and reruns are an evil sort of spaced repetition. A language learner would be a lot more engaged than a native speaker killing his brain cells. It is of crucial importance for language learners that a lot of TV programming is built around the needs of the “common man” (with perhaps only a secondary education). The dumbing down of America is great for language learners.

[Igor]

But reineke, this is the reason why I said "to moderate", the discussion never ends! I wasn't referring to any confrontation or impoliteness, probably I used a wrong word, sorry.
With your last response you didn't gave me any other choice but to reply again.

"Some of your stuff has been, if I may notice, point-seeking rhetoric and twisting of facts."
I will never accept some of the studies that you presented here like facts because of their disputed neutrality so you can't claim that I'm twisting the "facts".

"I don’t believe these people are any more evil than Krashen. I also don’t believe you were able to produce anything of substance against their conclusions."
I don't believe they are evil at all but I look at their work from a wider perspective as they are all teachers of languages, doing researches financed by their institutions (language teaching institutions) so pardon me if question their neutrality, from the other side there are scientists who are doing their job unaffected by the fear of the teaching industry and possible sanctions from the institutions where they work. I also don't have to produce anything of substance against their conclusions, it is produced enough by now in the links that I presented to you and their conclusions are just like their researches are, biased. A man doesn't has to be Einstein to realize that something stinks in the claim "at the rate of five words per novel established in this study", even in your native English at age of 60, you could learn more words per small novel than that.

"I do not subscribe to any language learning mantra."
Neither do I.

"I also have a bone or two to pick with Steve but I've never felt the need to hound him about it."
If it is so, then why didn't you try to start this "marvelous" (at least for me) debate earlier but you waited for me to pave the road? Were you afraid of something?

"Unlike you I don't have a ready formula (I thought you admitted no one had figured it out yet)."
I didn't realized earlier about what formula you are actually talking about, but now I can say that "I have figured it out", I have my own formula how would I learn my next language or advancing in some previous one, a complete formula, carefully planed and tested (at least most of it) from the beginning of the studies until their end.

Good bye and happy, happy learning! Hopefully few years from now we will debate by exchanging and criticizing whole books (our books) about language learning. :o)

Igor

[Alex Case]

"The early teens is a crucial period for language development. It’s a time when the child explores a vast number of linguistic worlds, and builds up a lexicon for talking about sex, politics, music, TV programmes (radio, in my day), sex, woodwork, stamps, sex, cars, boats, trains, planes, sex, and a great deal else."

David Crystal in his latest book

The silent period hypothesis is based on L1 acquisition of languages by children, and yet children learning L1 make many mistakes and continue to develop their language until their teens, including types of language which they would have had zero exposure to during their silent period like academic writing. How can this be related to people still making mistakes with L2 language they learnt at school but not with more advanced things they picked up later? Surely that is simply because the more advanced things (e.g. phrasal verbs and idiomatic phrases) are learnt a different way, and are not as late acquired as more "simple" forms like articles. Krashen is big on Natural Order, does he really claim that his method makes accuracy in article use less late acquired? If not, what role does the silent period play?

[Steve Kaufmann]

My views, not based on any research.

1) I do not find that David Crystal has much of interest to say.

2) I do not find that children make lots of mistakes. They are very good at absorbing what they hear and figuring out the patterns.

3) I make no distinction between academic language and the language. It is all just language, your brain will figure out and internalize the words and phrases and patterns.

4) Simple ( e.g. articles in English, or he and she for a Chinese speaker in English) does not mean easy to learn. Just ask a Russian about articles.

5) The only difference between learning your first and subsequent language is that you have more experience, and an existing vocabulary to fall back on.

6) I use LingQ to short circuit the massive reading of graded material recommended by Krashen and which I do not do. I move into authentic material including literature within months.

That is all I remember. I may do a video on all of this.