i started reading english books 9 months ago actually i am experimenting his hypothesis. i will do the IELTS in August to see the results. i read 8 hours a day and actually i am enjoying. i have read 60 graded books , hurry potter 7 books the hoppet and the lord of the rings, 20 nun fiction books 25 magazines and i am continuing. last see the results by the way i'am IRAQI so my native language is Arabic. thank you so much doctor Krashin. I hope you are right because my future depends on your accuracy .
My best students (I teach Taiwanese kids from age 4 - 17) are all readers. One boy’s dad made him read for 2 hours a day - often books that he couldn’t understand as a 10 year old. Now he’s completely proficient. I must add that my school immerses kids from age 2, so one would assume all the students should be fluent by the time they’re 8. But that’s not the case - the readers are the ones who outperformed the rest.
Also, my best 10th graders attribute playing online games and chatting to people around the world as the single biggest aid in their acquisition of English. Another says that she only watches English RU-vid videos. They’re in a country where English is a foreign language (not a second language), yet they’re completely bilingual.
Excuse me, Prof. Krashen, but how can you deny that the more often we use a grammar rule correctly, the more effortlessly it will come to us? Whether it's a grammar rule or a simple piece of vocabulary, practice and repetition are both fundamental to our ability to recall them at will. Can you really not understand this or do you not want to understand this because it would damage your reputation? There is absolutely nothing wrong with combining the comprehensible input hypothesis with the skill building approach. Why consider them as mutually exclusive?
By reading and listening to conversations, we implicitly practice the grammar rules. Repeatedly. Consistently. I have been teaching Taiwanese kids for the last 13 years, and can say with certainty that the four year olds who just spoke and read (instead of learning) are now fluent and bilingual 17 year olds. The kids that focused on ‘learning by repetition and practicing’ lost motivation at some point, and never overcame the hurdle.
@@colinoswald2 That's exactly the point - four-year-olds do but adults don't, otherwise you wouldn't have immigrants iwho have been in foreign countries for decades throughout the world who cannot string a sentence together without making mistakes.
@@TheHaining You are absolutely right. People immigrate under the impression 'when you live there, you'll pick up the language' and they end up saying a few scattered words here and there but will never go far. So, if we're talking about languisitic competence, literacy, nuances of language, that is just NOT the way to do it. The environment gives you only things you do understand. The point is, as Krashen himself puts it, you acquire language as long as things are comprehensible. That is when you land in a country whose language you barely understand, how on earth are you going to reach fluency? Those benefiting the most from the environment are those already above the intermediate, as they are capable of recieving much more input.
@@TheHaining In my opinion, however, practice might work effectively when the structure or the vocabulary item has been internalized by numerous encounters (mostly when unaware of it). That is when the learner already has a FEEL of it and how it works-- I am seeing this both in my studets of English as well as in my own learning German and Italian.
