The inspiration for this short blog post was Dr Krashen’s talk, ‘Technology: useful tool if used to create and enhance comprehensible input ‘, was one of the plenaries on the second day of ‘Wired in or out’ technology symposium at Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul on December 1 & 2, 2012.

In his talk, Dr Krashen reviewed his Language Acquisition theory, and talked about the good (as he called it) war between the skill building  hypothesis (1) and the comprehension hypothesis (2),  a war which is “good” in the sense that (1) it deals with the core issue of language education, and (2) what we are learning from it.

He then quoted some case studies (including his own) and talked about input that is not just comprehensible but compelling as well. He also talked about the value of narrow reading, i.e., reading the same genre or the works of the same author.

Despite the lack of technology in his talk – one handout, no powerpoint!  – his presentation inspired and engaged the audience. You can download that handout here

Here you can see the recording of his talk  in three parts.

An interview with Dr Krashen

Later, at the end of the symposium, Dr Krashen was kind enough to say a few words to me in a short interview.

Resources

• Stephen D Krashen   You can download some of the books freely as well as recent research articles
• Wired in or out Blog  You can read reports of various presentations at the conference
• @skrashen on Twitter
• Stephen Krashen on Facebook