Welcome to Cultural Connections Lab. I'm your host Dr. Kelly Forbes. We are here to talk with educational professionals around the world to impact and influence the education system as we focus on cultural connections and the education of multilingual, diverse students.
We're excited to have you join us today. We sincerely hope that you enjoy the show.
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Welcome to another podcast episode with myself, your host, Dr. Kelly Forbes. I am so excited to have everyone with us today.
Listeners, thank you for tuning in. We have an incredibly special guest today. We have Dr. Steven Krashen. Dr. Steven Krashen completed his PhD in Linguistics at UCLA in 1972 and is currently an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Krashen is the author of more than 525 articles and books in the fields of bilingual education, neuro-linguistics, second language acquisition, and literacy.
He has received numerous awards, including the Mildenberger Award in 1982, given for his book, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning.
A Pinsler Award, sorry, forgive me, a Pinsler Award given by the American Council of Foreign Language Teachers for the best published article in 1985.
The Dorothy C. McKenzie Award for distinguished contribution to the field of children's literature, a Doctorate of Humane Letters awarded by Lewis and Clark College in Portland, and the Kenneth S. Goodman in Defense of Good Teaching Award by the College of Education, University of Arizona.
There is so much to say about our amazing colleague in the field of education, specifically for second language acquisition and second language learning.
There does not need to be a huge introduction. You know him well or you can look him up and see his information.
But an esteemed colleague and mentor for me, even though we just recently have reconnected again, but Dr. Stephen Krashen, thank you for being with us today, truly.
You left out the most important part.
There's so many important parts.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He betrayed me. 1972, I was the inclined bench press champion of Venice Beach, California.
No kidding.
I hung out in Venice Beach for 10 years and I met Arnold.
And let me give you, I'll tell you the real story on Arnold. Tell everybody you know.
Arnold's a nice guy. Oh gosh. He would show up. He'd come over, watch you do bench press, he's tied like this, you know, and he was always right. My God.
Arnold was the governor, a world champion bodybuilder, and a terrific actor. Pretty good.
Well, Dr. Krashen, I know that there is there's so much of a world of knowledge for you to share with us. I know that we have one big question that we want to ask and get to right before I ask that question.
Is there anything that you want to share just to set up this listening space with our listeners? I know you're a man of many words.
That's true, in fact.
But I really feel I'm on a mission with this stuff. The research on reading is going to make life so much easier in school, out of school, it's going to save time, save money, it's going to make everything better.
So I'm very excited to talk about it all the time.
Well, I'm very excited as well. I fortunately I've had the honor and the privilege of having wonderful professors around me, and they have shared your work. My first master's degree was in the field of bilingual education, TESOL programs at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma.
And I know that we have mutual friends there. You have been very gracious and have participated in keynote speeches for the Oklahoma Association for Bilingual Education. I had the privilege of even introducing you one time, and I remember I made the reference.
I said, Garth Brooks, Mr. Country Music, you know them well. It's like Dr. Krashen is the language acquisition. They go together.
There's no missing it. But this big question that we have, and I love this question, and I'm so passionate about this topic, as I know you are, so I can't wait to just be quiet and listen to you.
But what is the most important thing we can do to promote competence in English? And I'm so excited for our listeners to hear. We've had a few discussions about this, and so I pose that question to you. Let's discuss this a little bit.
Very simple. I'm so glad you asked, okay? I'm going to ask this one. Okay. The most important, easiest thing we can do that's going to make life so much easier, better, make sure you've got a good library, and kids have a lot of time to do self-selected pleasure reading.
Let me tell you about when I was in secondary school and high school, this was in the Midwest, all English in those days, I took language arts, and in language arts, we had assigned reading. We did the classics of British literature and American literature.
We had to take tests on them, write essays. I did all that. I passed the test. I did okay. Today, I don't remember a single book that was assigned at all, ever.
I do remember, I think, nearly all the books I selected myself. Well, beginning was comic books, of course, and it still is. Not only have I met Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I've met Stanley, one of the inventors of Spider-Man and former president of Marvel Comics, et cetera.
It was amazing. Gosh, I could talk for an hour about Stanley. I went to one of the, okay, I'll talk for a minute about it. Stanley gave a talk at a local school, so of course, I showed up, and it was time for questions from the audience.
Of course, I raised my hand. And you know, Peter Parker, Spider-Man's real persona is a great scientist. He invented the web shooters and goes swinging around and all this stuff.
And I said, when is Peter Parker going to graduate school? Would that be a great message? And do engineering and technology and all this? He said, hang around. I want to talk to you later.
I had lunch with Stanley, thanks to that conversation. Can you imagine that? It was absolutely wonderful. Okay?
That is indipidus. And even better, two weeks later, the Chicago Sun-Times, I think, had a Sunday special. Spider-Man was a regular in their Sunday comic strip, and they had a big spread, a whole page where Peter Parker went to the local college and talked to a faculty member about going to grad school.
And the faculty member looked just like me. So, moment of fame. Your benefits, let me tell you. Okay, that's all my name dropping that I can do. The important thing is self-selected reading.
I'll tell you what I read on my own. First, comic books, of course. When I was third grade, I was in the low reading group. My father brought home comic books. He said, Stephen, get all you want. I'll pay for them.
Within the end of the year, I was up to the highest group. Okay, comics books. Absolutely, absolutely did it. No question. So what else did I read? I read baseball stories.
They were amazing. The author was John R. Tunis. He invented this mythical Brooklyn Dodgers team and went through the players, their personality. I have written a couple of papers that I've published about the literature messages of these books.
I'll tell you about one just so the audience can get an idea of how exciting these books are. In one of these, the team shortstop, who's young, he's like 27, 28 years old, is appointed the player manager of the team.
Which is very unusual. He was modeled after Lou Goudreau, became one of the first player managers. And you see, I know my stuff on baseball history.
Anyway, he had to give a sermon to the players to gain their respect. And he said, here's what I'd like you guys to think about. When you hit a ground ball to the shortstop, you're in the major leagues.
99 times out of 100, the fielding is going to be fine. This throw is going to beat you to first grace, first base, you're going to be out.
So a lot of times what people do is they take their time sauntering over to first base because they knew they're not going to make it.
My advice to you, not on my team, run like hell. You never know. The shortstop may drop the ball, the first baseman may drop the ball, it may be a wild throw.
In other words, this has stayed with me ever since. Be impeccable in everything you do. Do it right.
So when I wash the dishes, I make sure I dry them carefully, put them in the right place, etc.
The comic books are full of good advice like that. So comic books were a big part. I read comic books and I read science fiction.
Three things, science fiction, etc. And science fiction, the research on science fiction is Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein in those days.
People who read science fiction studies show no more about science. You learn a great deal about all kinds of areas.
So those three were not assigned. I chose them myself and they were just right for me. So my big message is self-selected reading that you decide you want to read, not assigned reading, which nobody cares about.
Nobody wants to do. Well, that's my speech for tonight. Thanks for inviting. Oh, we got more? Good.
I love it so much and I wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying. I remember my time as a principal and the students would say they would call me Senor Quelito.
They said, Senor Quelito, school is so boring. It's like when I first got there, I said, I know, but we can change it. We can get better.
And it was the simple things just like that. And you and I have spoken to this about this a little bit that one of the biggest reasons why this is so difficult apart from various other topics currently happening in today's society.
But the fact that it's free, no one's making money off of this. But this is what we see in the research that works. That's why they're not doing it.
Nobody makes money. That's it. Most of the things that happen in education that move is where the rich get richer.
So the follow up question to this, I'll jump ahead and then jump back if I remember. Yeah. How do we encourage reading? How do we get kids to read more?
Well, there are a couple of good studies in addition to having a very good library, a qualified librarian, books kids like, and free time to read.
There are a couple of things that turned up in the library journal that I really like. Both articles are about one page long.
One teacher said, if students are browsing in the library and they come to a book they like, make a mark in it so everybody will know those are the books that get taken out.
The other one, Spider-Man and the Library, very similar. What they did is they took the big table in the middle and they put spread out comic books.
Library traffic went up. The amount of comic books taken out went up. The amount of non-comic books went up. No one has duplicated these studies.
No one's making money on them and that's what drives education. I want to say a couple more things about reading. People who read more for pleasure know more.
They know more about everything and this is a great study.
Stanovic and Cunningham, 1993, which I think is one of the best papers ever published in our field.
They went to high school students and gave them questionnaires on what they like to do read.
And they also gave them, you know, what did you like for pleasure reading? Which magazines, which books, etc.
And they also gave them knowledge questions about a wide variety of fields, you know, about chemistry, technology, history.
People who did more popular everyday reading did better on those tests. Not the people with better grades.
Isn't that fantastic? I love that. So reading for pleasure gives you an incredible amount of knowledge.
In addition to the research, let me quote a couple of people you've probably never heard of. Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky said, you know, what is going to get people into this is reading fiction, lots of books they like, etc.
And another unknown person, Barack Obama, said the same thing.
And I can get along with people, all kinds of different people is from reading novels. Isn't that amazing?
And fiction specifically, right? Because that's where we get to learn more empathy.
Fiction, you become the character. That's exactly it. You become the character. You go through the same decision making, etc.
It gives you deeper insight into reading. It's going to make life much, much easier.
Nobody makes money on it, but okay, this is what we've got to work with. That's what the research says.
Well, and then not only that, apart from learning, you know, character components such as being empathetic, etc.
But there's also the building on your cognitive academic language proficiency.
Right. That is the most obvious. And so of course I forgot it and I should have said it first.
People who read more are better in every aspect of literacy. They spell better.
Donald Trump was once criticized in big newspaper because of his spelling.
He made spelling mistakes and people said, oh, you're worried. We didn't get a master speller.
We got a master's politician and all that stuff. Spelling is correlated with reading ability because people read a lot, spell better.
And we know that Donald Trump doesn't read anything. He's the least important person in our society probably.
Okay. So it's reading that counts. It gives you all this stuff.
I wrote a whole book on this, which I'm going to tell you not to buy, even though I'm very proud of it.
The power of reading 2004. And it's got all the research in there, gobs and gobs of research, but it's too expensive.
I checked the prices this morning. I always do this before my latest talk.
And the power of reading, again, I really think I did a good job on it, can run you $25, $30.
I suggested people order used copies. Okay. It's the same text. You'd be able to handle it, put it on a shelf, underline it, et cetera.
And I want to do my favorite study on this, which is very recent, only a couple of years old.
It's called Sophie's Choice. Okay. From the novel, the same name.
A girl named Sophie came to the United States from a Chinese speaking country, China, in about the fifth and sixth grade.
In the school she attended, they gave them a test every year on English in general, English grammar vocabulary.
And they gave them the same test at the end of the year to see how much they improved thanks to their ESL classes.
Well, Sophia took the test every year and she got worse during the year.
She did worse on the test in the spring than she did in the fall.
Then she go home during the summer. She come back. She take the test again.
She was better than she was in the fall. She was just absolutely fine.
What did she do over the summer? You know exactly.
Now this was in Chicago, which is pretty hot in the summer.
She went to the local air conditioned public library.
She went to the section of books for young kids, especially Nancy Drew.
I've read Nancy Drew. I think it's pretty good.
Sweet Valley High I think is also good.
She didn't read to get better in English. She read them because she liked them.
She averaged 50 books over the summer. No wonder she did better on the English test.
This is a wonderful direct comparison. I should give some credit to the co-authors.
The second author of the study was Fei Shen, who is one of my students.
He's still doing very good work. I'm happy to say.
So the research right away comes in and says it's the amount of pleasure reading you do, not the amount of study.
And this is what language arts should be. And everyone's going to be better.
And we will be right back.
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And now back to the show. Here's something else. I'll add this because this has been on my mind the last few months and you're too polite to interrupt me anyway.
So here I go. Read what you want to read.
You get books that are part of your special interest.
Rumi, the Persian philosopher, everyone has a special interest and a special talent.
And you're happy when you get to do things that are on your path.
Selected reading tells you what your path is and you can go after it.
I want to take a moment here and tell you about my path. And when I discovered it, I had no idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I said I kept dropping out of school and all. I didn't know what I want to do.
And mom suggested that I go on a bicycle trip with a bunch of teenagers in Europe.
Mom always had really good ideas, in my opinion. So I signed up for it as a youth hostel trip.
We bicycled through England and down the Rhine Valley and all that. We wound up in Switzerland.
I was not a reader then. I wasn't any good in foreign languages. I did terrible in high school French.
I passed only because the teacher was kind and didn't want to ruin my grade point average, et cetera.
I heard Yiddish, but it was grandpa talking to mom and I never paid attention. And none of us ever got me.
I went to Hebrew school, but I only learned the alphabet. So that was it. Then it happened.
I was at a youth hostel in Germany, sitting around watching all the kids, really interesting gang.
And there was a young guy sitting near us. He spoke German to the people at my table, leaned over, spoke French,
really impressive to other people, and spoke English to me and my friends and did a good job.
Then it hit me right then on that spot. That's what I want to do. That was it.
The next day, I was on a train to Paris and I enrolled in a French school. And since then, it's been languages, languages, languages.
My most recent – oh, I went to Vienna in order to do music. That was going to be my profession.
And I had a big problem with the teacher and I stopped taking lessons with her. But my parents let me stay in Vienna.
I went to the university. I took German classes. I got a bunch of friends who had other friends who spoke German.
At the end of the year, my German was really good. I got better in French because I read French science fiction, which is absolutely incredible.
I've done a little bit of I'm Herrick from Ethiopia, all the Hebrew, et cetera, from being on the kibbutz. Oh, the kibbutz, what an exciting thing.
My wife and I were on the kibbutz and we learned a fair amount of Hebrew. We went to visit my relatives in Tel Aviv.
I spoke Yiddish to the older relatives. That was fine because it's very just like German. The relatives my age, English only.
They all spoke English as well as we do. That was it because that was the trend in Israel. I went into a store to buy something.
They would answer me in English when they heard my accent, et cetera. My most recent adventure is Spanish, of course.
And this started two years ago. I walked into the supermarket and they had a new policy of staying open late, which is good for older people, shopping, et cetera.
And the guy who served me ran up the bill was Ramon. I saw his name and I knew a little bit of Spanish, not much.
So, of course, I spoke to him in Spanish and he answered me in English. He said, the boss says we have to speak English to everybody.
And I said, Ramon, me meta esta hablar español como estates. I want to speak Spanish the way you do. I said, hablamos español.
Fine. We spoke Spanish. I got better over that year. No question. Not from talking to him though, because we only talk for about a minute at a time.
He's bringing up the groceries. I went to the library and I got tons of basic, easy readers in Spanish.
They're called graded readers. And here's the good news, sports fans. The graded readers have become literature.
The stories are more and more interesting. I've been reading graded readers in Chinese and graded readers in Spanish.
And the stories are OK. They're pretty good, in fact. In fact, I co-authored a couple with one of my teachers.
So my Spanish has gotten much, much better. In fact, I'm now the hero of the grocery store.
People come up to me, speak, I hear you speak 10 languages. No, not quite. You know, that kind of thing.
But it's the reading that's done it. And I'm reading a little bit in Spanish every single day.
And it's still I'm now to the point where I can read authentic Spanish. And it's not from study.
Ramon doesn't correct my mistakes. It's not from grammar. It's from reading interesting fiction that's so interesting.
I forget what language it's in. It's so compelling. It's compelling.
You've got to experiment on yourself if you're a researcher all the time. Oh, I got to tell you about my favorite story of this that happened.
One of my heroes is a woman named Lomkato, who is a polylaboratory, 20 languages. I met her in Budapest.
And she made the point, she said, if you know a little bit of a language, that's good. Don't put it down. It's fine. Take advantage. Use it.
I was in New York and I had to get back to LA. And I got on the escalator to go down to the stop, the subway stop.
There was a woman at the bottom of the stairs. Obviously, she had with her a guidebook written in Chinese.
And I realized then she's probably spoke no English. Okay. So of course, I went up to her and I spoke to her in my primitive Chinese.
I'll give it to you exactly. I said, can I help you? I help you. Oh, yes, yes.
I said she had bags. So one of the words I knew was airport. I said, Feiji Zhang. Yeah.
I had my cell phone with me. And in the cell phone are pictures of my family. We got on the subway together.
I said, Ni, Zhou, Gei, Wo, you come with me, Feiji Zhang. And she sat with me. I showed her all the pictures of my grandchildren.
Told them the told her stories. We had this great conversation. I got her to the information place. I found her a Chinese speaker who got her to her airplane.
That felt so good. You know, languages. I had this experience. There's nothing like it.
Being able to help someone. And Womkata was right. It was because of her. A little bit can make a huge difference.
So that's how it became an obsession with me. And it continues all the time. And it'll never stop.
I think whenever I speak to other people about being bilingual or multilingual and we have conversations about the benefits, the number one thing that always comes up is being able to help somebody else.
The other person identifies as that being the biggest benefit. I think that's so wonderful to see that kindness and that integrity in other people.
Tell us a story. How you help somebody.
Well, so myself, there's a whole lot of different ways. I've been so fortunate to travel around. My grandparents, I mentioned them to you before.
My very best friends always encouraged me to travel a whole lot. But it's been in small spaces like the tag agency, for example.
There might be someone who is having some difficulty. And so I always kind of step back. I'm not here to jump in anyone's way.
I want to be respectful. So for all of our listeners, the same thing. Whenever we can be helpful, kind of assess the situation.
But it was obvious that this gentleman was having some difficulty. So I just asked him, is it OK if I help you?
And he looked at that face that just changes automatically. Oh, my goodness. Thank you so much.
So I helped him through the process. And you can't help but feel good afterwards and think, wow, what an awesome superpower to be able to help someone in this small way.
All the way to having been an interpreter for a woman who was falsely accused of a crime and interpreting in their jail cell.
And so then you're considering the exactness of translation interpretation versus trans adaptive.
Does it have the same meaning? Because this is about someone's legal and legal future and personal future.
So there are less in the field of education. My biggest passion in bilingual, multilingual education and helping families and students and really considering the role of advocacy and allyship and what we do and the role that cultural proficiency plays in creating an atmosphere where all of us have opportunities to succeed in ways where we learn from each other.
But we're really an interconnected, multicultural society.
You have found your path.
You know, supposed to be doing in this lifetime.
That's it. You're supposed to be languages and help people that way.
That's my path to.
Well, I that's so kind. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. I have read. I mean, it's so funny on this podcast. I get to meet so many amazing people and I feel like every time it's another master class. And I just think, how do I get to be so fortunate to sit in one on one and all these master classes?
I'm always acknowledging that my students, my very first, what I consider my first real class when I felt like I was the teacher and there were seven countries and eight languages represented in my in my classroom, all newcomer students, sixth to eighth grade.
And they were the best professors I ever had my entire life. And I was so fortunate. But as I was doing that, I come from a background where Spanish was my major. I was going to be a dancing bilingual veterinarian.
I didn't want to be an education at all or anything. But I got into education, fell in love with it. I knew show business. So I tried to make the classroom a show, which, you know, then you start to put like project based learning and, you know, compelling, comprehensible input.
And, you know, you start thinking, how was I making this what I didn't even know what it was yet because I hadn't studied it. And that's where I got I was.
Well, I received a scholarship, a full right scholarship for a master's in bilingual education, TESOL from the University of Central Oklahoma. And that's where I was introduced to you was through the literature and the research.
Dr. April Holman and Dr. Regina Lopez and Dr.
Well, the other professors as well. Anyway, they were the ones that first introduced me to you. And so it's been it's been wonderful for me to be on my journey to learn more about my journey.
And the older that I get, I feel like it's not until later in life that I learn more about myself because I spent that and you still you're always worried about other people.
Exactly. You meet people who are going to help you on your journey. They're there.
Yeah, yeah.
And provided. Yeah, it's there was April waiting for you. Yeah, yeah, it's really, really fantastic. And so in which then, you know, through those connections and relationships, I've been able to to meet you, you know, it's so much fun to meet someone who you just respect so much.
I've been reading their research, putting their research into your own work as well. And then you just get to sit here and have moments like this. So it I'd also lived in Thailand at one time. But between these personal relationships and then geographically being located on the other side of the world, you realize how the world really is so small and we have so many so many connections with each other.
I once met Noam Chomsky. Can you believe that? I'm going to tell you about my conversation with Noam. Oh, my gosh. We were discussing the critical period of language acquisition.
And the idea was that there's a biological barrier. OK, that if you don't get the language by puberty, you're going to have an accent forever. It's going to be terrible. All that stuff. And that was by Eric Lindenberg.
OK, turns out that Chomsky and Lindenberg went to school together. They were classmates. I did my dissertation on this because I thought Lindenberg was right.
OK, and I was going to show he was right that there is and I found out he was wrong. OK, the data didn't support it.
And then one of us said Chomsky was part of this conversation on the TV, on the computer. And I said something like there's nothing wrong with being wrong. He enthusiastically agreed.
There's nothing wrong with being wrong. This is how we make progress. It was a wonderful conversation. So someday if I'm ever wrong, I will appreciate that.
It's definitely through our mistakes that we learn more. A thousand percent different.
I didn't want to ask another question that I know a lot of people have asked me. And I, of course, have my thoughts about this. But no one's on here today to listen to me. They're all on here to listen to you.
The question is this. Whenever we do want to support our students and their self-selected reading and to be reading for pleasure, knowing that we have students that are coming from very multilingual, multicultural and very diverse backgrounds,
what can our educators do to make that classroom library or the books in the library, the ones that we want them to go read that most likely are going to be in English,
which I'm always promoting books of many different languages in our libraries. But I also know that the reality is that majority of our books in our school libraries are in English.
What can we do to have our students represented in those books or what or how important is culture in this component of a student considering who they are, their culture, and then self-selected reading whenever many of the books may or may not resemble anything that they might be interested in.
I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? I wouldn't worry too much about it. I would have wide selection and let them figure out what they like and what their friends recommend because you never know.
You never. By the way, a little footnote that's relevant to both of us. The thing about bilingual education, one of the hot issues, kids come to the United States and
they lose their heritage language. They acquire English, but they can't talk to their grandparents anymore.
Two studies.
Both of them conclude you get a reading habit in the heritage language.
You're going to be okay. That's why the library should have books in the first language as well. Grace Cho did a wonderful study. She's a Korean bilingual ed teacher.
She went to a party in her neighborhood, Korean American, and she was amazed that a lot of the young people there, young people means in their 30s or so, spoke Korean quite well.
Even though they were born in the United States and had never been to Korea, they were all pleasure readers. They all had access to interesting novels, etc.
Lucy say Jeff McQuillen's wife has found exactly the same thing in her study. Okay, so more studies, more libraries with lots of things in the primary language.
Most of the time you won't find that. You won't find books in the primary language, etc.
But this is going to give you background knowledge, going to make you bilingual, all the things we want.
But I wouldn't worry too much about getting, particularly as I would have a wide selection, the students will find what they like and you never know.
And I think it's important what you say, though, is about how do we get, and I like, you know, marking it inside of the book, but how do we have our, how do we have students and their friends work together to tell other friends about what they want to read?
Because it's so true. I remember sitting in school and open up your book to page 53 and we're all going to read this and only one person in the class even wanted to read it.
And so, I mean, it's too young a point, but I don't remember ever a time getting to even share the books I was interested in with my other friends.
Like, that wasn't even part of our conversation in the classroom. It was just teacher-led, period.
You and I are going to change all that.
Yes, yes. And we must.
Yes, exactly. You're going to keep talking about it, writing about it, and promoting it, and little by little.
I love, so you had sent me the email that has some of the research in it that we were going to discuss today, and one of the things that I wanted to bring up, and I love research.
I always kind of joke, a little aside from me, I always joke that in education we love to teach research, but then whenever we're in education, we don't want to apply research.
So I say, we need to teach it and we need to apply it.
So for everyone else out there who loves research like I do, there was some research about the effect of self-selected pleasure reading on language and literacy.
And you had mentioned for the guided self-selected reading that a group of eight students in Japan who were learning English as another language, that they were reading, again, for pleasure, but that on their test that they took,
the TOEIC, I believe, that they reported that for each hour of reading, the students gained an average of point six points on that.
So after two years, they were scoring about 720 points out of a thousand, which the score to show that you had the level of English necessary was only 250.
And so their scores were double that, and all of that again on your guided self-selected reading.
Yeah, let me give a little more detail about that study.
The person responsible was Beniko Mason, and she set up a really nice program, originally for English in Japan.
Kids come in, these are kids with no support, who've never had English, let's say.
The first semester, she tells stories that are rehearsed in advance.
She's picked them out, knows they're comprehensible, and draws pictures on the board to make them more comprehensible.
The second, and from that you pick up a fair amount of basic vocabulary.
The second semester, the kids walk into the classroom, and the table is graded readers, and they pick the ones they like. They don't have to finish the ones they start, no book reports, et cetera.
That's how she got those results. Lots of graded reading, easy reading, lots of easy reading.
I'm still to the point with Spanish where if I pick up an authentic book written in Spanish by Spanish speakers for Spanish speakers, I sometimes have a little trouble.
I'm still at the graded reader stage after a year or so of reading.
Not bad though, because I can have a conversation, no problem, et cetera.
In fact, people think I'm really good in Spanish from all the lots and lots of easy reading that I've done.
I wouldn't worry about it too much, make helps when they're ready. Just make sure there's a lot of choice and a lot of easy stuff to read.
Graded readers are getting a lot better.
They are, and the stories are really good. Sometimes the message is so deep, it even pulls really big emotions out of you.
There's a book, and I can't remember the title right now, but it's a pre-K book.
That's why I think that was so incredible, this pre-K book.
It was really deep and profound, and you think this is where it starts, this is where it needs to be fun.
Get kids engaged, even as adults, for us just to be able to sit down, just to be excited and happy and engage with what we're reading.
So many teachers are concerned about, well, there are certain vocabulary words we have to learn and all these lists and these definitions.
They can't help it. They'll get them.
Exactly, but I love how in the application of what we were talking about, the end story listening,
that the students are not responsible for studying the new words used in the story.
They were told just to sit and to enjoy it, just to sit and just to take it in to understand it.
And the teacher going through using the reality as some drawings, anything else that would be needed to help with the comprehensible input.
But the students task was to sit and to enjoy.
That seems like it should be. Exactly. Exactly.
But I think that's an important part for us to stop and put a pin in.
We need to make sure our students are enjoying what they're doing.
Again, going back to it being compelling for them.
And it's going to be different books for different people.
100 percent, 100 percent.
What was your you had mentioned this just earlier in the conversation,
but at that one point where you thought this is my path, this is what I want to study, this is what I want to do.
I know that from myself, I do have some background with my grandmother who should have known German,
but going through the education system, no longer knew German or grandmother, though, spoke German to my great grandmother.
They read the Bible together in German, et cetera.
So I've always grown up knowing that I had access in previous family members, access to another language.
So me being bilingual in English and Spanish, but I should have had German.
I should be tri-lingual right now.
Do you have any parts of your life growing up where you knew that there were the other languages that were around and then have this connected to where you are today?
I don't feel bad that there are languages I shouldn't have.
You have to honor your lineage and get those languages.
Maybe it'll come along.
You're still young, boy chick.
You know, take your time.
It'll come.
If it's not, and if not, so what?
Just continue to help people and have a good time.
The good thing about you and me is that we are getting better in our profession by doing things we like.
And that's what I do.
Do what you like.
Do what you love.
Do what makes you happy.
Life is too short.
My Kiki always says you live once and then you're dead for a long time.
So live it every single day as much as you can.
Yeah, well, you're doing a good job.
Thank you, Dr.
Krashen. Is there any final closing words that you would like to leave?
I feel funny when people call me Dr.
Krashen because I'm not the real one.
The real Dr.
Krashen is my son who is a professor of mathematics.
Can you believe that?
That seems scary to me.
When I grew up, I wanted to be like him.
And he knows several languages and all these things, et cetera.
So I'm really outclassed by him.
I'm not a professor of mathematics.
I'm a professor of mathematics.
It's a pleasure.
Let me tell you.
So from now on with you and me, boy, check it's Steve. Okay.
Stephen Kelly. All right.
Stephen and Kelly.
That is wonderful.
And it just for all of our listeners.
Stephen here.
He does have.
So much that you can.
That you can see that you can read.
And I will have the link.
To a website where you can see past and recent articles and books as
well.
And I will have that in our.
Description for this podcast and access to it.
I just want to say thank you so much.
I.
Thank you.
On behalf of many other people that maybe we'll never have the honor
and privilege.
Like I have had today to get to sit and talk with you.
But thank you for all of your work in the field of education.
And thank you for what you've done to help.
Make people like me better. Well, what we do,
we can move forward in this unity and legacy together.
Let me complete the family description.
My son, I said, as a math professor,
my daughter.
Is a public librarian.
Is that cool or what?
I'm a public librarian.
Have I succeeded?
It seems like you have two amazing legacies of your own for sure.
Well.
My friend, Stephen, thank you so very, very much.
And I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day.
And I'll reach out to you.
Just so we can keep on.
Having this conversation and having some fun together. All right.
Okay, buddy.
We did it.
Good work.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thank you for joining us today.
Don't forget to like, follow and subscribe.
Thank you.