Stephen Krashen on youtube

[mungouk]

I'm sure many of you are much more familiar with Stephen Krashen than I am, especially the theory of "Comprehensible Input", but I've been thinking a lot about reading recently (much easier than doing it, ha!) and today I decided to find him online.  I was surprised to find a lot of good content out there, including on youtube.

 

I found this talk from the British Council in Turkey (2015) to be particularly interesting, and at the same time very entertaining—to the extent of laughing out loud. This talk applies to all language learning, although there is some mention of young heritage learners of Mandarin at one point.

 

I thought that some of you might enjoy this as much as I did. The videos are about 20 mins each.

 

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgdMsOcSXkQ

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XRwCN-MANs 

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzBl6jBtf6E

 

There's also a short interview with Krashen and Steve Kaufman of LingQ over here, which is how I found these in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lyNDbgqsB0

 

Krashen mentions in this 2017 interview that he'd recently started to learn Mandarin.

 

 

 

 

[Jan Finster]

Thanks for sharing. I have watched a few of his interviews and lectures in the past and I always felt that you could summarize his 20-45 minute talks as a TLTR or TLTW: "You learn languages mainly through lots of input. If you read enough as a form of comprehensible input, you do not need to worry about grammar and the like".  Am I wrong? Did you get anything more out of his talks?

[mungouk]

8 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Did you get anything more out of his talks?

 

Well yes... understanding of his background, inspiration and research. And an hour of entertainment. 

[mungouk]

Actually, quite a few things he said resonated with me... learning through problem-solving being a good one.

Living here in China I feel like I'm constantly trying to solve problems using my L2 — especially today in the bank... ?

 

He has lot of good stories too. I'll be looking for more of his stuff on YT.

[amytheorangutan]

I haven’t seen these particular videos but I’ve seen other ones of him. Thanks for sharing, I generally find his approach to be helpful and I think people like Steve Kaufman, Matt vs Japan and the guys at Mandarin Companion all sort of follow this approach in some ways. 

[Balthazar]

There's a good summary of Krashen's main idea in this video too. (Or at least I think so, I haven't read anything he's written myself)