Commentary on research in language acquisition and language education
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 […]
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:
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) […]
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…
I was recently interviewed by Álvaro from Natural Languages about using comprehensible input in language teaching.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Studies reviewed: Krashen, S. & Mason, B. (2017). Sustained silent reading in foreign language education: An update. Turkish Online Journal of English Language Teaching (TOJELT), 2(2), 70-73. (open access) Swanson, E., Stevens, E. A., Scammacca, N. K., Capin, P., Stewart, A. A., & Austin, C. R. (2017). The impact of tier 1 reading instruction on […]
From a recent issue of Language Teaching Research (open access) dedicated to vocabulary teaching: For the past decade, we have been witnessing a heated debate between the advocates of ‘vocabulary-through-input’ position and the proponents of word-focused instruction. The most recent example is the discussion between Cobb, Nation, and McQuillan in the October 2016 issue of Reading in […]
In a previous post, I reviewed a recent study by Reynolds (2016) on the impact of frequency and “congnativeness” in vocabulary acquisition. It is worth discussing his data a bit further in order to compare his findings with Paul Nation’s (2014) estimates on the time efficiency of vocabulary acquisition through reading. Nation analyzed a series […]
This press release is making the rounds this week, announcing a collaboration between Sesame Street and the letters I, B, and M. Big Bird and Big Blue are teaming up to do “learning in the cloud” with Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings Watson the Super-Computer. Their first project together is called a “cognitive vocabulary learning app”: Watson’s augmented […]
I stumbled across the following observation this morning from a 1983 technical report on reading comprehension by David Pearson and Margaret Gallagher: Existential Proofs The logic of existential proofs seems to be something like this: “If I can prove that a variable affects reading comprehension, then it becomes a candidate for future instructional manipulation. Even better, if […]
Milliner, B (2017). One year of extensive reading on smartphones: A report. JALT Call Journal, 13(1), 49-58. Back in the 1980s, I spent my first year out of college working as a clerk in small clothing company (I majored in ancient history). There was a sign in the break room meant to provide a little […]
One of the leading online retailers in Japan, Rakuten, is getting into the English-teaching business. According to their press release, their “Super English” lessons will use software developed by a new startup in the language teaching “space,” Lingvist.io. Here’s how Lingvist summarizes its system: Lingvist applies mathematical optimization and statistics to make the language-learning process as fast as it can theoretically […]
Zhou (2017) looked at what makes second language readers “anxious” when reading. The factors Zhou examined, including amount of study abroad, previous study in the language, heritage language background, and number of foreign languages studied, accounted for only about 15% of the anxiety measured. I think a better way of addressing this issue is to consider that reading anxiety is a […]
There was an article on translating the first book of the popular Wimpy Kid series into Latin in today’s Wall Street Journal. The reporter interviewed a Latin teacher, the book’s publisher, and a college professor of classical languages. This is what the teacher said: “That’s so cool. I can’t wait,” says Ginny Lindzey, a veteran […]
A recent post by Brad Peterson on the supposed popularity of Chinese language study around the world sent me digging for some data on the whole question of what foreign/modern languages are popular in U.S. schools and, well, what we mean by “popular.” There are at least three ways you could define popular when it […]
Note: The following guest post by Stephen Krashen concerns an article recently reviewed on TBL. by Stephen Krashen I comment on two statements in K. Nielson’s paper, “Self-study with language learning software in the workplace: What happens?” published in Language Learning and Technology, 2011, 15 (3): 110-129. The first is the claim that Rosetta Stone is […]
Study Reviewed Nielson, K. (2011). Self-study with language learning software in the workplace: What happens? Language Learning & Technology, 15(3), 110-129. Almost no one who studies a foreign language in the United States gets very far. Millions of high school and college students show up to their Spanish or Chinese I classes in the hopes […]
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