And the notorious linguist Stephen Krashen had, and still has, many famous critics who are linguists and who say his method is complete
bollocks, and that it was partly the cause of the poor knowledge of grammar that English teachers have today. And babies don't remain quiet because they are embarassed and lack confidence; they have to wait until their nervous systems have developed to the extent that speaking is possible. I think we can assume that snowwhiteY2K is well-enough developed for speech.
But I do agree with most of your advice - the non-Krashen part.
In reply to Raymott's post:
I really don't mean to highjack this post.
First of all I would like to thank Raymott for sharing some of my advice. However I feel an explanation is required as to my reference to Stephen Krashen.
By mentioning Krashen I wanted to say that acquiring a foreign language should be made as natural a task as possible and pressure on a learner to produce a language is totally unnecessary and unbeneficial. As well by citing the silent period I meant to refer to Krashen's insight that 'Perhaps the "silent period" observed in natural child second language acquisition (Hakuta, 1974; Huang and Hatch, 1978) corresponds to the period in which the first language is heavily used in"unnatural" adult second language performance. The children may be building up acquired competence via input, and several recent studies (Gary, 1974; Postovsky, 1977) imply that less insistence on early oral performance may be profitable for children and adults studying second languages in formal settings' (Krashen ,1987).
That happened in my own case as well, when, after studying English grammar for years at school, I had to move to an English speaking country and was exposed to a totally different variety and reality of English. I did take my time, I listened and I thought about what people were saying and how they were saying it. All along, however, I avoided putting myself under pressure to produce language. Only after a few months I felt confident enough to speak and I must say the results were not bad!
From my own experience, as both a learner and a teacher, I do believe that a natural approach is definitely more effective than any skill-based approach. Like me, many teachers feel the same way regardless of how good their grammar knowledge is.
I must admit that your response did surprise me. For someone who is involved in an academic environment I found your way of dismissing Krashen's studies somewhat inelegant and ineloquent. Furthermore, I shouldn't really be the one to remind you that we are discussing language issues on a forum dedicated to improving learners' English, not only in so far as grammar but also where their way of expressing themselves in English is concerned. Hence, your resort to rough language seemed inappropriate.
May I just conclude this post (also my last post on this thread) with Krashen's words.
'We must, however, realize that it is our professional responsibility to teach according to our convictions about how people acquire language [...].
At a minimum, students should be informed that the skill-building hypothesis is in fact a hypothesis, not an axiom, and that other hypotheses exist' (Krashen, 2004).
* All cited sources have been taken from
Books and Articles by Stephen D Krashen
Krashen S.D.,
Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, 1987, p 68-69)*
Krashen S.D. 'Why support a delayed-gratification approach to language education', in
The Language Teacher 3-7, 2004, p.4).*
