Students need to speak to learn a language and the more students talk, the more they learn. Not according to Professor Stephen Krashen. For 40 years he has championed the concept that what students should be doing in class is reading (and listening), not speaking. In this episode, Stephen tells Ross some of the arguments against forcing students to speak, something which might not just be inefficient, but in some cases counterproductive.
The Downsides to Speaking (with Professor Stephen Krashen) - Transcription
Ross Thorburn: Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week we have a man that I think does not require an introduction. That's Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus from the University of California. I'm pretty confident all of you know who he is.
In this episode I spoke to Professor Krashen about something which I think is so common in language classes that we often don't discuss it on the podcast. That is getting students to talk and the disadvantages of doing that. Enjoy the interview.
Ross Thorburn: Professor Krashen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's fantastic to have you on. You had a great article called "Down With Forced Speech." In the beginning of it, you had a really nice anecdote about your neighbor and anxiety from speaking in language class.
Professor Stephen Krashen: Well, that was the incident with my daughter, which really changed things. She was four years old, and I went over to pick her up. She was at the neighbor's house. She's playing with the neighbor's daughter. I was going to take both girls back to our house. I went there.
Our neighbor, a good friend of ours, said, "Sorry that you have to do this. We would have liked for her to stay longer, but I have to go off to class. Thanks for taking both of them." "So you're taking classes?" "Yeah, at Santa Monica Community College. I'm taking Spanish."
She says, "Wait just a moment." She goes in the kitchen, gets a glass of water, takes a pill, and swallows the pill. I said, "What was that?" She said, "It's Valium," like Prozac today. "It's Valium."
Ever the researcher, I had to find out what was going on. I said, "If you don't mind my asking, why are you taking Valium before Spanish class?" She said, "It freaks me out. I get really nervous." I said, "What is it about class?" She got it right away. "Talking, having to talk, being called on in class."
That got me going. I looked at the research. The number‑one activity that causes the most anxiety in foreign‑language class in general? Talking, when you're called on, etc., when you have to say things that you've learned but haven't acquired. The least anxiety, of course, is reading. All the research again supports it.
Forcing yourself to talk or forcing a student to talk is not going to push language acquisition any faster. It just makes them uncomfortable. The ability to speak easily and fluently is the result of language acquisition. It's not the cause. We have overwhelming data, I think, that leads to the conclusion that it doesn't help.
We've a lot of people who've acquired language very well with little or no output. We have societies that basically insist on it as a condition. They allow people to talk, relax, etc. I've looked at case histories where people speak languages very well. Wouldn't say anything for the longest time.
They simply relaxed and got comprehensible input that they understood and that they found interesting. See, as a scientist, I'd say it's a great hypothesis with no counter examples. As a regular person, I would say it's true.
Ross Thorburn: Presumably, ultimately then, the issue here is that nervousness and anxiety stops students from learning. It raises their effective filter. As soon as that happens, language becomes more difficult to learn. Is that right?
Stephen Krashen: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ross Thorburn: Then I guess there must be some cases where that's maybe less true. I find in teaching, for example, primary‑school‑age children, that they seem to be much more willing than adults, in general, to speak in front of the whole class.
Stephen Krashen: Well, they're less concerned about making mistakes. That's for sure. There's less pressure on them, so the anxiety is going to be lower. I still think that it helps language acquisition when they talk. The only way it helps is indirectly. If you talk and you're lucky, someone will answer back. That's conversation.
When it invites input, it helps. The real cause is comprehensible input, of course.
Ross Thorburn: Now, speaking activities are very common in obviously English classes. Is a main benefit then from a comprehensible‑input point of view that if students are speaking to each other in class and the people that they're speaking to, the other students, are getting input from their peers? Is that right?
Stephen Krashen: Yes, and probably they're best off by listening to the teacher. I don't know how much they're getting from the other students.
Ross Thorburn: I've also read, I think in some of your research, that students at lower levels might make errors as often as every second word. Is there a danger then that by doing those kind of speaking activities in classes, that students are going to pick up on the errors of their peers and learn or acquire those errors?
Stephen Krashen: Well, I'm sure it happens, of course. I'm one of the few people in the profession who's not too worried about fossilization, that these errors are there forever and they'll never go away. The people who claim this fossilization, I've looked at their data. If you look at people over a long term, they do gradually get better.
We have not looked at the impact of really rich, a massive amount of comprehensible input. Here's what usually happens.
If you look at someone who has emigrated to another country, came as an adult, speaks the language as a second language like so many people in the United States, and if the person has had a chance to make friends, have a life, and is a reader, they usually acquire the language very, very well. A good case is former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Everyone says, "Oh, he doesn't speak English that well." When you listen carefully, Arnold speaks English very well. He's extremely articulate. He makes no grammatical errors. His sentences are complicated. His vocabulary is immense. He was governor. Man, he was good. He didn't have trouble except for his position in education, but that's another story.
I should say, by the way, that back in the days when I was working out on Venice Beach in my competitive weightlifting days, Arnold was there all the time. He was very friendly. Oh, my God. You'd be over doing bench presses. Here's Arnold. Mr. Universe would come over and say, "Yo. Do you need a spot? Can I help you?" "No." See? Very nice guy. I have to say that because he gets a lot of bad press.
Anyway, his English is extremely good. He has a slight accent. When you listen to his accent and you listen to the accent of other people who, say, speak English as a second language, it's never very heavy if you listen hard. They don't speak English using the phonological system of the first language. Most people have acquired most of the phonology, say 95 percent of it.
Our problem is that our standards are ridiculously high. If you don't speak with a perfect native accent, it's considered unacceptable. That's just plain crazy.
Ross Thorburn: I think people don't necessarily want to sound like native speakers, do they? Your accent says so much about your identity that that might not really be necessarily what people want.
Stephen Krashen: Good for you. I think that one of the reasons that we're not perfect is...Oh, let me back up. Accent to me is a marker of what group you are a member of. They say that anyone who opens their mouth you can tell where they're from, who their friends are, etc. To a great extent, that's true. You can tell a lot about people. It's very uncomfortable to try to be what you're not.
If someone could, for example, give me a magic pill and I could swallow it and sound completely French when I speak French, I don't know. That's not really me. It's like being slightly overdressed or slightly underdressed. There are good reasons we have our accents.
Ross Thorburn: I remember meeting a professor from Cambridge years ago who was Greek. She lived in the UK for years. She said, "Hey, you know what? When I speak English, I don't want to sound English because I'm not English. I'm Greek. I don't ever want anyone to assume that I'm someone who I'm not."
Stephen Krashen: People worry about it needlessly, I think.
Ross Thorburn: I wanted to ask you to tell us briefly about something which I think does the opposite of creating anxiety, which is also related to speaking, which is acculturation. Can you tell us a bit more about how that might be a motivating force for students and helps them?
Stephen Krashen: Who do you connect with? Who do you acculturate to? You acculturate to your friends, not to a nationality. A language is where I have the best accent. My German accent's pretty good. I don't know if people think I'm native maybe for a few minutes. French is OK. Mostly it's Canadian. My accent in Spanish is Mexican, not in any other. It's not Cuban. It's not Spain.
Not because I have a special affinity for Austria where I did German, or Canada, or all these things. It's because I had friends. They were the ones I acculturated to. I was a member of their peer group. I talk the way my friends do. I don't think, "Gee, it's great to be Mexican." Mexico's fine, but I don't have patriotic feelings and [indecipherable 9:42] that stuff.
Ross Thorburn: I suppose all this relates back to anxiety and speaking, doesn't it? I've certainly found that among my friends my Chinese is going to be a lot more fluent than if I'm in a situation where I don't know the people or I'm talking about an unfamiliar topic.
Stephen Krashen: I'll give you my example. Again, I have no hard evidence. It's just my experience versus others, but I thought it was a pretty good example. My French comes hundred percent from Canada and largely from several months I spent there in 1981 when I was a visiting scholar at the University of Ottawa. We did some research on children ‑‑ subject matter, teaching.
Then I would go back occasionally, and we'd meet. We were working on one article we did in English and one in French. The one in French, I met with the French group. The people in the French group were people I knew very well. One had been my French teacher. One was my buddy, [indecipherable 10:37] . Everything with these people was always in French 100 percent.
We were having the meeting. I was in charge of it. I was outlining the paper, what we might do. The door opened, and a stranger walked in. I thought, "Oh, my God. I'm probably making a complete fool of myself. I'm sure I'm not getting things right." My French collapsed on the spot. I was less fluent. I probably started making mistakes, and it was involuntary.
I call this the output filter. It affects our performance, success phobia. We don't want to feel too perfect, etc., whatever, but it's very real. For my case it was. Depends on who you're talking to. The other time with French, I was in Paris with my daughter whose French is pretty good. She went to a French school for a while. She's quite good and comfortable with it.
This is a little bit after the episode I just told you. I met with a local sociology of language professor from the Sorbonne, and we met in a coffee shop. My daughter was with us. She would go off ‑‑ she was a young kid at the time ‑‑ and play video games, come back. This person spoke about 90 languages, but none of them was English, so we had our conversation in French.
We certainly got lost in the idea. It was a great conversation. My daughter came over and said, "Dad, I was amazed at how well you were speaking French. I didn't know you could do it. My gosh. It was great." I wasn't even aware. That's when the filter is down. It's up when you feel you're being judged. My accent in French is variable.
Sometimes I sound reasonably good. Sometimes I'm told I speak French without a trace of a French accent.
Ross Thorburn: Why do you think that speaking activities continue to be so popular in language classes in spite of maybe students' own feelings? You mentioned earlier that these activities can cause anxiety and research that shows that the key to language acquisition is comprehensible input as opposed to output or skill‑building.
Stephen Krashen: What happens is that people invent all these other activities because they feel like language teaching. You can fill the classroom hour. The public will accept them as language. Each student is given a sentence, and you have to get together to put the sentences into a coherent story‑‑ that kind of stuff. Is there any evidence it works? No.
Does it feel like language teaching? Yeah, teachers do it all the time, or "Let's do a closed test. Let's do a vocabulary activity, etc." These feel like language teaching, but we don't have evidence they do.
Ross Thorburn: What then do you think about speaking activities that teachers do in class that are maybe based around comprehensible input? For example, maybe you read the students a story that they're engaged in. Then afterwards you discuss the characters, or personalize it for the learners, or focus on the language.
Stephen Krashen: Is it better to think of an activity to do post‑story, or is it better to tell another story? My hunch is that it's better to tell another story because if you interrupt with activities, what we found so far is that the story in terms of acquisition is more efficient in terms of amount gained per unit time.
The only activity that is sure‑fire is compelling. That means so interesting you forget it's in another language. Compelling, comprehensible input with lots of language going on. I don't know any activities that do better than that.
Ross Thorburn: One more time everyone, that was Professor Stephen Krashen. If you're interested in finding out more about his work, visit his website. It's www.sdkrashen.com.
Hope you enjoyed the show today, and we'll see you again next episode. Bye‑bye.