Krashen, meaningful input, free reading and bilingual education, some thoughts.

Del canal Odeo de The Linguistic extraigo este interesante y pertinente podcast, a cuenta de la temática de este Blog, sobre las teorías de Krashen ( desde la perspectiva de la Educación en USA): EL Input comprensible y la educación bilingüe.
Don't miss it.

Download the Podcast Stephen Krashen has, from what I can gather, three main areas of interest, 1) second language acquisition, 2) literacy and the importance of free reading, and 3) bilingual education. While I largely agree with Krashen on his basic views of language learning, and the need to encourage people to read without artificial interference from teachers with their reading strategies and analysis, I differ with him in certain regards. I believe that meaningful input is crucial, and the most important activity in language learning. However, we can and should do things to increase the attentiveness of the brain, the ability of the brain to notice what is happening in the language, as the new language is absorbed through massive amounts of meaningful input. That is why it is useful to review words and phrases, not because we will remember them, but because we start to notice them better in our reading and listening. That is why we should try to write and then speak, just a little at first, and then more, so that we discover what we lack, and look for it in our listening and reading. That is why we benefit from being corrected, not in the hope that we will immediately improve, but so that we will be alerted to things to look for in the language, as we listen and read. I think that reading is powerful, but listening is more powerful. New language content should be heard, often, especially at first, before it is read. Listening can also increase the emotional involvement with the content we are learning from. This improves the learning efficiency of the brain. I am not in favour of bi-lingual education for immigrant children, in the sense proposed by Krashen, as I understand his ideas. The child of an immigrant to a country like the United States is better off studying in English, as early as possible, and being encouraged to belong to the English speaking mainstream. This does not prevent the child from learning the ancestral language, if the child, or as is more often the case , the parents, want that to happen. In fact, in my view, the child should be encourage to learn languages, period, whether the ancestral language or some unrelated language. The choice should ideally be left to the child.