Krashen, S.D. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition.

[academic nonfiction]

For some reason I switch over to nonfiction when my brain gets burnt out.

And I actually am attempting to log every book I read, however few people might be interested.

Some of you may remember Stephen Krashen from The Power of Reading; when I saw that he did a second language acquisition book, I was intrigued, because acquiring new languages is something of a hobby of mine.

I did my undergraduate degree in linguistics at McGill, which has been called "MIT's northern field outpost" for linguistics, which means that McGill professors are mostly Chomskyites and I have a certain pro-Chomsky bias myself (in linguistics. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on his politics). Chomsky said that we don't really learn languages; we acquire them. As children, we don't play the piano or play tennis or program computers unless we have lessons or at least deliberately correct our errors and try to improve; on the other hand, all eight-year-olds who have grown up in an English environment without serious cognitive or emotional problems can speak English perfectly. Yes, even those who use "ain't" and double negatives; they're speaking their own dialect of English perfectly, which doesn't happen to correspond to formal standard written English as well as they expect in school.

I believe this, which incidentally doesn't mean I don't believe in teaching grammar; standard grammar is an advantage in school, in getting hired, in dealing with the public, in writing, even if only for the social status it confers--and any way of helping people get social status without spending huge amounts of money is a good idea. But I don't believe in criticizing people for speaking bad English, unless they're copy editors or CNN reporters.

This ends Linguistics 101 In 30 Seconds. Now, people have long proposed that first languages are acquired, but second languages are learned in the same way that the piano is learned, because most people do not learn second languages very well. More recent research has hypothesized that languages really can be acquired even as an adult--it's just that they usually aren't. What Stephen Krashen proposes is that the key to learning a language is getting enough comprehensible, natural, interesting input, and being allowed to speak freely without the fear of having one's errors corrected.

I don't know whether this is true or not. I suspect that it is. My high school classmates were all on the college prep track, and took a language, and never did very well in it or cared about it at all. I started reading everything I could get my hands on in Japanese, however puerile. When I progressed really quickly, my teachers thought I was a good student, and my classmates thought I was talented, and someone joked that I had been Japanese in a past life, which I promptly disproved when I disastrously studied premodern Japanese. I had, without realizing it, simply stumbled upon exactly the method Krashen says ought to work. And it did work.

So I feel rather vindicated, and I feel better about reading Spanish novels and watching Plaza Sesamo and not caring the slightest bit about my command of formal grammar.