I recently did another YouTube interview (to be posted shortly) and realized that I had forgotten to post this one (with James Stubbs) from last year. We talked about the research on the use of flashcards in programs such as Anki to building second language vocabulary. Transcripts (cleaned up a bit from YouTube) are below […]
Fundamentals of Language Acquisition: Two Talks
July 26, 2024 by
I gave two one-hour talks to the IZ Education Centre for beginning teachers over the past six months or so. The first one reviews Krashen’s theory of second language acquisition and can be found on my YouTube channel: The second one, a follow up Q&A, is on the Centre’s website:
Interview with Matt Brooks-Green on Language Acquisition
April 29, 2024 by
Popular YouTuber Matt Brooks-Green interviewed me recently on some key concepts in acquiring a second language. It’s a brief tour (23m) of acquisition versus learning and topics related to vocabulary development, aimed at the non-specialist. Matt does a great job editing the video (check out some of his other work on his channel as well) […]
Interviews with James Stubbs on “Future Multilingual”
March 21, 2023 by
James Stubbs over at Future Multilingual (YouTube channel) interviewed me recently about second language acquisition and vocabulary instruction. It was a lot of fun – thanks to James for inviting me! The interviews were short and to the point. You can find them here. Transcripts below…
The Case for Acquired Phonics
November 18, 2022 by
Stephen Krashen and I have published a very short paper, “The Case for Acquired Phonics,” which argues that the “acquisition/learning” distinction applies to phonics. Abstract: Researchers in second language acquisition have hypothesized that there are two very different ways of gaining knowledge of language: acquisition and learning. Learning results in conscious knowledge of rules, and […]
Interview with Álvaro from Natural Languages on Comprehensible Input
April 25, 2022 by
I was recently interviewed by Álvaro from Natural Languages about using comprehensible input in language teaching.
How to Teach Intermediate Language Students
November 10, 2021 by
I gave another lecture via Skype to the IZ Language School last month (October, 2021) in Zanjan, Iran, talking about how to teach intermediate language students. Since most of the students were new to teaching (of any kind), the talk includes some general information on teaching and language acquisition theory. I supplied the students in the […]
NABE Talk Materials 2021
April 26, 2021 by
I’m giving a short talk as part of a panel presentation on heritage languages for the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) this week. Below are links to the studies I’m discussing: How Should Heritage Languages Be Taught? The Effects of a Free Voluntary Reading Program. Foreign Language Annals (1996). Reading versus Grammar: What Students […]
Heritage Language Development (Krashen, Tse, & McQuillan, 1998) – Free Book
April 25, 2021 by
One of the first collections of papers on heritage language acquisition and education was , published in 1998 and edited by Stephen Krashen, Lucy Tse, and me. The book contains both original research and comprehensive reviews on several important issues related heritage languages and their continued maintenance. The book is now available for free in PDF […]
Does Teaching Morphology Improve Vocabulary?
July 6, 2020 by
Does teaching morphology improve students’ vocabulary? Short answer: No. Long answer: See my recently published article here. Medium-length answer: The theory behind morphological instruction is that if you teach students Greek and Latin roots and/or common prefixes and suffixes, students will be able to apply that knowledge to figure out the meanings of new words. […]
How We Improve Our Vocabulary (Video)
May 18, 2020 by
I gave a talk to a group of students and scholars at the IZ Education Center (Iran) via Skype on May 15, 2020. I’ve edited the video to include only my presentation, since I don’t have permission to include video/audio feeds during the Q&A session. The video quality of the recording via Skype isn’t brilliant, […]
I’m Not a Real Doctor, But I Acquire Like One from TV
January 14, 2020 by
We’ve previously reviewed evidence that you can pickup scientific vocabulary from reading science fiction. Now a new study shows that you can pickup medical vocabulary from watching TV dramas about doctors and hospitals. Yen Dang at Bristol University (Dang, in press; paywall) created a list of 895 medical words types* that occurred frequently in medical […]
Can Language Minority Students Acquire Academic Vocabulary from Reading?
December 4, 2019 by
Gallagher, Taboada Barker, Beck, and Buehl (2019) evaluated yet another academic vocabulary intervention for middle school students. They concluded that language minority (LM) students (called “English Bilinguals” in the study) “need explicit instruction to improve vocabulary knowledge” (p. 15). They claimed to show that LM students were unable to acquire any new academic words incidentally from the texts […]
The Shaky #ScienceOfReading on Decodable Texts
November 21, 2019 by
“Decodable texts” are books written so that the words that appear in them conform to the phonics rules children are taught. So if children have been taught the rules for the correspondence between the letter n and the phoneme /n/, m and /m/, c and /k/, t and /t/, p and /p/, and s and […]
Vocabulary, Grammar, Sex, and Aging
November 19, 2019 by
The title Vocabulary, Grammar, Sex, and Aging is from a paper published a few years ago in the journal Cognitive Science, not what’s been on my mind lately. The study, by Fernando Moscoso del Prado Martín at UC-Santa Barbara,analyzed a large corpus (a million words) of telephone conversations from men and women of different ages in terms […]
The NAEP Reading Panic: 2019 Edition
November 14, 2019 by
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – “the Nation’s Report Card” – has released results from their latest round of reading tests. These tests are given every two years, but regardless of the results, the reaction in the press is nearly always the same: “We have a reading crisis in America!“ This panic isn’t […]
Why Reading Fiction is Good for Academic Achievement
November 11, 2019 by
The education writer at Forbes, Natalie Wexler, argued last week that reading fiction isn’t the “only” thing needed to boost academic achievement. It’s a curious position to take, not because it is wrong – I agree with her completely – but because no one in the reading field I’m aware of has ever said that […]
Another Massive Vocabulary Study Finds No Gains, Massive or Otherwise
November 5, 2019 by
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Education’ series are being reposted over the next few weeks. Jayanthi and colleagues (2017 online; paywall) conducted a study – in what seems like an endless series of massive, federally-funded studies of this sort – to determine the efficacy […]
An Early Start in English as a Foreign Language Doesn’t Help
October 29, 2019 by
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Education’ series are being reposted over the next few weeks. Jeaekel and his colleagues (2017, paywall) followed two large cohorts of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in German schools for a period of seven years. One […]
The Myth of Teaching Morphology
October 21, 2019 by
Several researchers have claimed that “morphological instruction” is an effective way to improve students’ vocabulary and reading proficiency (Carlisle, 2010; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006). The theory is that once you know the parts of words (prefixes, roots, suffixes), you will be able to “transfer” your knowledge of morphology to learn new words. A bigger […]
Should Intermediate English Acquirers Read Children’s Literature?
October 17, 2019 by
Reading in a Foreign Language just published my critique of an article from the previous issue (Macalister and Webb, 2019a) on the topic of children’s literature and adult ESL readers. There are also two rebuttals to my piece (Webb & Macalister, 2019b; Macalister, 2019)). First, a TL;DR summary on the exchange. Macalister and Webb (2019a) […]
Error Correction is (Still) a Waste of Time
October 8, 2019 by
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Education’ series are being reposted over the next few weeks. Dlaska and Krekeler (2017) looked at a group of students preparing to enter a German university (N=225) who were taking a German as a Second Language course. The study […]
A Reverse Turing Test: Is Good Language Teaching Robot-Proof?
October 1, 2019 by
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Teaching’ series are being reposted over the next few weeks. The always brilliant Gene Glass provides a list of jobs that are “0% Automatable” (cannot be done by a robot) and “100% Automatable.” He uses the list to examine […]
Reading Tests That Don’t Measure Reading [CORRECTED]
September 25, 2019 by
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Teaching’ series will be reposted over the next few weeks as separate entries. Hua and Keenan (2017, paywall), following up on early work by Keenan and her colleagues, examined five popular reading comprehension tests to see how much […]
Reading Tests That Don’t Actually Measure Reading
September 25, 2019 by
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Teaching’ series will be reposted over the next few weeks as separate entries. Hua and Keenan (2017, paywall), following up on early work by Keenan and her colleagues, examined five popular reading comprehension tests to see how much […]
How Kids Become Readers
August 19, 2019 by
Just published in the Los Angeles Times August 18, 2019: Some parents fear that their child may “fall behind” in learning to read. But there is no evidence that learning to read, or reaching a given reading level, must be done by a certain age to succeed in school. It is true that students who […]
Free Book! “The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions”
March 4, 2019 by
My book, The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions, is now available in PDF format for FREE here. Here is the back cover blurb: Jeff McQuillan has hopeful news for anyone concerned with the state of reading in U.S. schools: Contrary to popular belief, reading achievement has not been declining over the past three decades; U.S. […]
Language and Language Teaching Special Issue Guest Edited by Stephen Krashen (Free Download)
January 21, 2019 by
Stephen Krashen has guest edited an issue of Language and Language Teaching (India). There are 11 great articles on topics that will interest language and reading teachers from preK to adult, for both first and second languages. You will want to take a look – and it’s free! Download it . Contributors to the special […]
What Counts as Success in Vocabulary Instruction?
April 30, 2018 by
I’ve discussed in previous posts (here and here) the inefficiency of academic vocabulary teaching programs such as Word Generation. In one evaluation of the program, Snow, Lawrence, and White (2009) found that after 30 hours of instruction, Word Generation students learned fewer than three extra words compared to a control group. That’s a whopping one new […]
Is Synthetic Phonics Instruction Working in England? (Updated)
April 23, 2018 by
Since originally posting this analysis back in September, 2017, I have shortened it for publication in Margaret M. Clark’s new edited volume, Teaching Initial Literacy: Policies, Evidence, and Ideology (2018). But here I’m posting a somewhat longer version than the one included in Clark’s book, with updates to my original post. Is Synthetic Phonics Working in England? A […]
Don’t Believe What You Read in the Papers: American Kids Are Getting Better at Reading
April 17, 2018 by
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones magazine has an excellent take on the so-called “failure” of American students to improve their reading scores. It’s a quick but important read now that the annual NAEP Nonsense Season is once again in full swing, in which the media tells us how awful American schools are doing (e.g. here, […]
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