Krashen, SLA and Yabla

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Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week, I want to talk about the five theories, Krashen’s five theories and Yabla. You hear me talk about Yabla a lot because I absolutely love it as a learner, I love it, love it, love it.

And just a quick review of what it is, it’s just a subscription site and they have collections of videos in Spanish, French, Italian, English, Chinese, and I believe German. And essentially it’s a growing collection of videos. Just as many subscription sites are, there’s always something new. And it’s a mix of some that are specific to grammar lessons, especially immersive produced language lessons by Yabla or people that they’ve contracted to do so in the different languages, as well as commercials and documentaries, game shows, music videos. I could go on and on and on and on. And they’re broken up into little bits and there’s a patented player and you can play it slow or fast. You can repeat it. It’s captioned. It’s also subtitled. You can click through words and it’ll give you the definition. It’s pretty amazing.

And in addition to that, into being able to see all this language and culture, there’s also a series of games. I like some more than others. So there’s one where you listen and you pick the missing word. There’s another one where you use space repetition to go through a set of flashcards of chunks of words that were taken from the video vocabulary. It’s called Vocabulary Review. There’s some other ones, Scribe and a couple of other ones, some comprehensive retention questions. I haven’t tried all of them, but the first two I mentioned are my favorite.

Krashen and SLA Theories

So I talk about Dr. Stephen Krashen a lot as well, and it’s my belief that when you understand something really well, you can explain it in a really easy, concise way that can understand it. And I think that he’s done a beautiful job with that, Dr. Krashen. I think that he’s just taken second language acquisition and in his five theories, he tells us pretty much everything we need to know. And I say this without any disrespect to so many other people who contribute wonderful things, but I think on a really practical basis, this research really resonates with me for a reason. And so I always look at it with whatever activity I do when I think about it for broader purposes. I definitely always find myself back at these five theories. So I want to go through them and I want to talk about what these five theories are and how to apply them.

Krashen and SLA: Learning/Acquisition

So the first theory is learning acquisition. So language learning and acquisition are two different things, and they’re both really important. So really we say language is acquired. So when you learned your first language, and I have to be really careful about how I use the word learn, but when you acquired your first language, you did so naturally. You absorbed through authentic input in communication. Through books, through your parents, through real communicative context, through reading, through your schooling, through music, through your worship, whatever that means to you, sports. Learning or the really deliberate things you do. So think of learning the parts of speech or learning vocabulary lists, that kind of thing, exercises.