TIA20 Academic Reading; Krashen

S. Krashen

Facilitating language comprehension; what we do as teachers naturally and what we should actually focus on.

Slowed down speech, clearer articulation, use of more high-frequency words, syntactic simplification, shorter sentences and the use of fewer idioms may appear to promote language comprehension however this limits students to minimal language input. Secondly, we actually tend to make these changes naturally when speaking to a second language speaker, therefore, this is not what we as teachers need to focus on.

Instead, it is important to focus on comprehension and communication and if we do this then the syntactic requirements will follow suit. (Krashen, 1982)

"Believe that your child can understand more than he or she can say, and seek, above all, to
communicate... "If you concentrate on communicating, everything else will follow." (Brown,
1977, p. 26. in Krashen, 1982)

Krashen highlights these strategies as effective methods of teaching language acquisition.

• Check students comprehension by monitoring their verbal and non-verbal responses.

• Use pictures and objects to encourage language acquisition. This helps students to understand concepts outside of what they know.

• Take advantage of what student's know about in the world however, be aware that if the context is too familiar they may have little or no interset and uptake will be minimal. Utilize their curiosity of contexts outside their known worlds whilst helping them make connections to what they already understand.

• Share the process of language acquisition with the students so that they can continue to progress and be aware of their progress independently.

These points affirm the work of Dr Jannie Van Hees and the intensive oral language acquisition work I have currently been doing. I want to be much more open with my students about the process of language acquisition. This is something I remember Jannie discussing with students on one of her modelling sessions for us teachers. This will help them to be metacognitive and add value to what we are doing. It will also help them to continue with their language acquisition when they are not in the class situation.

Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition.