concerned reader, no, he really doesn’t. Van Pattern is a proponent of understanding SLA in representationalist “Universal Grammar” terms, and while there are a certain number of SLA scholars out there that use UG in their theories, they are certainly not in the majority. There is a great deal of literature out there written by “SLA experts” (published in scholarly journals) that both agrees and disagrees with what Olle wrote, experimental results at the ready.

One problem is with how you define “deliberate study”, and the efficiency of most L2 instructional environments. The notion of “comprehensible” is also fairly woolly – comprehension is regularly multi-layered and how much, if any, glossing/subtitling/pointing, dictionary lookup, etc., is allowed before something can be considered “incomprehensible” is not well dealt with. These and many, many others are active areas of research, and are definitely not in the category of “settled science”.

Interesting! Thanks for clearing that up directly from the source; I have updated the article accordingly.

Hi Olle, here’s what Dr. Krashen said by email when I asked him about “i” after reading your article:

“No, “i” doesn’t stand for interlanguage. It is totally arbitrary. (I like algebra, so I like to use algebraic terminology, that’s all!)”

I think there are several things worth discussing here. First, I think forcing production early is really bad. This is very, very common in all Chinese classes I’ve taken. Teachers show you a word, tell you what it means and then asks you to create a sentence. I strongly believe that you need passive understanding of something before you can even stand a chance of being able to use it. Production without understanding is useless. It also leads to some bizarre results. I remember a 成語 class I took once where we were asked to create sentences and ended up getting it wrong five times in a row before giving up.

Second, the time scale involved is important. If you’re aiming for long-term learning, then delaying speaking certainly isn’t a problem, it will probably even do you good in many areas. However, if you live in a Chinese-speaking environment and want to use your Chinese yesterday, it doesn’t make much sense to deliberately delay output. One of the reasons people study for years in school without being able to use the language in real situations in because they haven’t really practised that. However, if the passive foundation is there, learning to speak is not difficult.

Finally, I don’t pretend to understand heritage learning situations. As you say, that’s a very different situation than that facing someone who studies Chinese as a foreign language, perhaps only a few hours a week. The reasons for learning, the socio-cultural situation is of course also entirely different. However, what you say at the end about providing comprehensible input while maintaining motivation is definitely true for both (all) groups!

In our work with students learning Chinese and other languages through true Comprehensible Input (not what I call “kinda-sorta comprehensible”, which is what happens when teachers misunderstand what i+1 means and give language that is less than 100% understandable or made understood), we have found that students speak quite easily when they are allowed time to acquire and no output is forced until the language “falls out of their mouths”. The situation with heritage learners is very complex, and often features strong emotions of guilt, fitting in, peer pressure, and sometimes being forced to attend traditionally-taught, non-CI-based classes (“Saturday school”) for years. Even with those who aren’t taken to classes, the psychological construct of being a kid in a second-culture family in the US can be very complex. I don’t think these factors are generally applicable to a person voluntarily learning a non-heritage second language, such as the majority of people learning Chinese. The important thing is to provide rich comprehensible input and simultaneously avoid killing motivation and willingness (for the vast majority of students) by not doing so.

Hi Diane,

Thank you for your comments and the links! As you say, the goal wasn’t to explain Krashen’s ideas, but I’m sure many readers would like to know more and knowing where to go is definitely a help. Regarding acquisition/learning, it’s really tricky. because normally when I write (on the website, in my book), I usually make distinction between “studying” and “learning”. The first is closer to what Krashen calls “learning” and the second is what I use when I mean that your Chinese gets better, whatever the reason or source. Mixing this up with another term will create complete chaos, so I chose not to do it and keep my own terminology to explain Krashen’s concept. This is of course not a good move in academia, but I think the article would be a lot more confusing if it had a “definitions” section at the start, at least for most readers.

When it comes to the “i” in “i+1”, I haven’t read much of Krashen’s own writing and nothing that focuses on this. He might not have used the term “interlanguage”, but what am I (or readers for that matter) missing if we read it as such? I could of course rephrase it so that it doesn’t look like a quote, which is bad if he didn’t actually use the term.

/Olle

However, in the term “i+1” does not stand for “interlanguage,” not at least as Dr. Krashen developed and uses the term. Also, I suggest that his distinction between acquisition and learning would help to explain why explicit study (such as memorizing of grammar points and how to use them) is seen as unrelated to acquisition of language. Acquired language is accessed in real time conversations, without time to consult those “rules” before speaking. In Chinese terms, I think of acquisition (as Dr. Krashen uses the term) as the 语言感 so desirable in one’s second language. “Learning” as Dr. Krashen uses the term, is something more related to editing one’s writing, and useful in special situations in which you have time to think and edit before producing language.

I realize you are not aiming to explain all of Dr. Krashen’s theory in this post, but the learning/acquisition distinction may help clarify things for readers. More on that acquisition/learning distinction here, on a blog by Latin teacher Justin Slocum Bailey: http://indwellinglanguage.com/the-bummer-about-acquisition-part-1/ See also the many articles on http://www.sdkrashen.com.

Your point about developing skill through output practice is also addressed by Dr. Bill VanPatten, and worth reading: http://revistas.um.es/ijes/article/viewFile/113951/107941 as well as Krashen’s own papers at http://www.sdkrashen.com. Several of his books are available on that website for free download.

And for my last link, it may be interesting to some readers to know that Dr. Krashen is currently working with a Mandarin language teacher to acquire Mandarin. That teacher, Haiyun Lu, wrote some about that here: http://tprsforchinese.blogspot.com/2016/02/dr-krashen.html