Thursday, May 23, 2013

Not with a bang but with a whimper

Stephen Krashen is one of the bigwigs in language acquisition theory, and one of the main reasons we have shifted from the grammar-focused, drill-and-kill methods of the past to a listen-and-understand model of language instruction.  He also has lots of interesting things to say on the subject of teaching as a professon and teachers; generally he is opposed to approximately everything that reformers want to have happen.

In this post he links to another post that predicts that by 2018, the teaching profession will be a very tightly-controlled, 1984-type dystopia.  Then Krashen suggests that the author is being too generous, that by 2018 there will be no more teachers.  I have very much been wondering if that isn't the ultimate goal of a lot of big-money reformers.  I'm not sure what to do with this, but I thought I should link to it.  I imagine I'm going to want to find this again.

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