Media and comprehensible input

From Stephen Krashen's mailing list:


Two Steps to Take
Published in the Korea Times, Feb. 28, 2008
Letter to the Editor

Dear editor,

I'm writing in response to a Feb. 25 Korea Times article, "English Education Needs to Start at Earlier Ages".
Prof. Ahn Young-sop is 100 percent correct when he points out that the overemphasis on testing is hurting English language education in Korea. The situation is the same worldwide, and the only ones who profit are companies that produce the tests and test-preparation materials.

His suggestion of expanding the use of English in media also makes sense. Research in language
acquisition tells us that we acquire language when we understand what we hear and what we read, and media can provide a great deal of "comprehensible input".

Studies done over the last decade, largely in Asia, confirm that wide self-selected recreational reading has a powerful effect on English language development for students of English as a foreign language, and those who establish a reading habit in English will continue to improve as long as they keep reading.

Prof. Cho Kyung-sook of the Busan National University of Education has been an important contributor to this research. The obvious step to take is to vastly improve English collections in public libraries and school libraries.

Another obvious step to take is to increase the amount of English aural input. Fortunately, this can be done for free, through http://www.eslpod.com, which provides a wide variety of listening experiences for intermediate students of English as a foreign language.

Increasing written and aural input will be far more effective and far less expensive than other paths, such as the establishment of English villages, starting English very early, and hiring more foreign teachers.

Stephen Krashen,
Professor emeritus
University of Southern California

7 groups of NBLT activities

Network Based Language Teaching (NBLT) is language teaching that involves the use of computers connected to one another in either local or global networks. Whereas CALL has traditionally been associated with self-contained, programmed applications such as tutorials, drills, simulations, instructional games, tests, and so on, NBLT represents a new and different side of CALL, where human-to-human communication is the focus. (Kern & Warschauer, 2000)

However, language learning activities which involve the use of the Internet needn't be limited to computer mediated human-to-human communication. Traditional CALL activities can also be developed in NBLT and are actually found in most LT sites.
As we know, the Web is full of authentic, reference and didactic materials useful for language learning. It also provides excellent tools for the interaction with those materials, processing information (input) and student production (output). And for linguistic contents and skills work, either integrated o specific.

Here is a list of 7 groups of LT activities using the Internet (or NBLT activities):

1. Lexical quizzes, games and other vocabulary learning specific activities (e.g. lexical maps, concordancers use, class dictionary building ...).
2. Grammar tutorials, exercises, simulations and games.
3. Listening and pronunciation virtual lab activities.
4. Reading and writing webtasks: treasure hunts, webquests, ...
5. Multimedia webtasks: scrapbooking, samplers, podcasting, tasks with authentic multimedia materials from social sites, ...
6. Computer Mediated Communication activities (email exchange, collaboration projects, CoP, ...)
7. Use of blogs and wikis for individual or group language learning e-portfolios.