Day of the Dead, National Novel Writing Month, and Krashen's bibliography

Today is the Day of the Dead, and I would be remiss if I didn't post this.  It's a beautiful little story that illustrates effectively the sense of exuberance of many Day of the Dead celebrations, a concept that some Americans struggle to understand. 

It's also National Novel Writing Month, which means I'm going to take a swing at writing one of my novels again.  I wrote 576 words yesterday, and so far this morning, I've written another 406.  Both of these are pretty far off of the 1200 daily average one needs to hit the target 50,000 by the end of the month, but I'll make it!  I'm pretty sure I know where the story goes next. 

Stephen Krashen just posted a bibliography to the moreTPRS listserv.  It is a collection of a whole lot of studies done in the last 50 years, comparing the effectiveness of implicit language learning versus explicit language learning.  I post it here mostly so I can find it again.  If I ever end up getting a doctorate in language acquisition, this is probably where my reading will begin.

SKrashen: Evidence that "implicit learning" (subconscious language acquisition) results in L1-like brain processing.

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.