James Crawford > Quotes

“Nevertheless, in the field of second and foreign language teaching, behaviorist pedagogy—i.e., direct instruction in various forms—maintains a large following, which seems to grow ever larger in this era of high-stakes testing. The connection is obvious. When educators’ evaluations, pay, promotions, and job security depend on “metrics” of student performance, there is a natural tendency to teach to the test. Hence the proliferation of test-prep materials, paint-by-numbers teaching guides, and commercial learning systems, inevitably advertised as “research-based” and “aligned to the Common Core.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“SIOP Feature 21 requires activities that integrate all language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking)—that is, forced output in English for all students, beginning at the earliest stages of acquiring the language.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Yet SIOP, without advancing any explanation, puts “language objectives” on a par with “content objectives” and teaches both explicitly.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Advancing no particular theory of their own, some insist that explicit teaching of grammar, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, and even pronunciation is necessary because students in immersion classrooms sometimes have trouble with these features of the second language. Direct instruction, they say, is the only remedy. Such claims rely heavily on short-term studies in which older students—rarely K–12 English learners—are taught a linguistic form, such as word order, verb conjugation, relative clauses, and so forth, then tested on their conscious knowledge of the form soon after.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“not focusing on language turns out to be an effective way to teach language in sheltered classrooms, especially the kind of academic language that students need for school.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“the Comprehension Hypothesis,12 elaborated by Stephen Krashen in the early 1980s. It holds that one factor above all is responsible for second language acquisition: comprehensible input in that language.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“conscious learning remains the method and goal of skill-building models. To the extent that students acquire any language at all in such classes, Krashen argues, comprehensible input—provided haphazardly rather than purposefully—is responsible.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“The more children focused on messages with a real-life purpose, rather than on, say, repetitive grammar drills or artificial dialogues, the more French they understood.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Noam Chomsky pointed out, the number of possible sentences is infinite in any language; there is no limit to the grammatical combination of words. Behaviorism cannot explain how, after relatively limited exposure to a mother tongue, young children acquire complex syntactic structures and begin to produce “correct” utterances never heard before, by themselves or by others. What’s more, they accomplish these amazing intellectual feats without being explicitly taught.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“SIOP’s authors never explain the benefits of standardization; yet standardization was clearly their intent. They say they first conceived of SIOP “as a research and supervisory tool to determine if observed teachers incorporated key sheltered techniques consistently in their lessons.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Teachers needed to emphasize the message, not the medium. Ideally, the curriculum should be so engaging that students would forget which language the teacher was using!”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“BOTH PEARSON EDUCATION AND THE NONPROFIT Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) have promoted SIOP as an all-purpose educational product: a tool for evaluating teachers, a template for lesson planning and “delivery,” and a course of professional development. They advertise their model as ideal not only for English learners (pre-K–12 and adult), but also for mainstream and special education students in the United States, as well as language students worldwide. Clearly, they believe the market potential is vast.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“the federal Institute of Education Sciences reviewed these studies and found all of them lacking—that is, none could “establish that the comparison group was comparable to the intervention group prior to the start of the intervention.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Krashen’s insistence that a sheltered classroom consists of second language learners only.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Another factor in the success of French immersion, Krashen postulated, was the exclusion of native-French-speaking students. The linguistic composition of the classroom, restricted to second language learners, made teachers constantly aware of the need to shelter their French to make it understandable at or near the level of the class. This also created a relaxed learning environment, reducing students’ stress levels. They all made errors in French and, without the presence of native speakers of French, errors were less cause for embarrassment. The result was to lower what Krashen has termed the affective filter, a psychological barrier that can keep comprehensible input”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“One would think that researchers concerned with program quality would have begun by conducting studies of various sheltering techniques and program designs to determine which were most promising in which contexts with which students.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“it’s hard to imagine a more tedious approach, practically guaranteed to deaden the enthusiasm of 12-year-olds.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Although it permits the use of students’ native language “to clarify key concepts,” this weak form of bilingual instruction has no support in educational research.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“SIOP is teacher-centric, a classic transmission model. Sadly, this approach is all too common in the education of low-income and minority students and of English learners in particular: Learning is conceived not as something a learner does, but as something that is done to a learner.52”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“we are unaware of any convincing evidence that languages are acquired through “practice.” On the other hand, studies have shown that students can reach high levels of proficiency through input alone—that is, with little or no production of the language through speech or writing.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“SIOP developers approached their project from the opposite direction. They began by announcing a model of sheltered instruction, incorporating a list of best practices that made sense to themselves and to a few colleagues. They presented this model as a detailed set of criteria, a rubric for effective sheltering. Then they asked a group of “raters” to evaluate the rubric for validity and reliability. Finally, they began conducting their own research on the model to see whether it worked. This is how SIOP came to be created and marketed commercially as “the only scientifically validated model of sheltered instruction.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Immersion teachers adjusted their use of French to make it accessible to students. They did this through careful choice of vocabulary, syntax, pacing, and intonation, and by avoiding needless complexity, making points directly rather than elliptically, and adding redundancy. Other techniques included contextual cues such as gestures, facial expressions, and body language.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“It is unnecessary, he added, to pressure students to produce speech or writing in the second language before they are ready, because “output” contributes nothing. It is the result of second language acquisition, not the cause. In fact, putting pressure on children to speak or write can be counterproductive, increasing stress and raising the affective filter.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Third, the Comprehension Hypothesis, on which Krashen’s concept of sheltering is based, holds that input is what matters in second language acquisition—not output. As noted above, forcing students to “produce” a second language can be counterproductive. Output per se does not contribute directly to language acquisition, and forcing speech before students have acquired enough language to express their meaning tends to create anxiety and embarrassment, thereby raising the “affective filter” that keeps input from getting through.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“educators of English learners should be well-versed in theories of second language acquisition and in methodologies such as sheltering and scaffolding. Their work should be informed by professional development and coaching from experienced colleagues on effective techniques in the classroom. But is there no room for diversity in teaching styles and techniques? Is there really just one way to shelter instruction?”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“All it really seems to prove is that if you assemble a number of like-minded people, who share a certain view of sheltering and how it should be done, a test will confirm that they agree with each other most of the time about what sheltering means.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“A highly structured, prescriptive model of sheltering and scaffolding is not necessary for effectively educating English learners. In fact, mandating any approach that allows for little deviation is likely to be counterproductive. Just as explicit instruction encourages passive learning, tightly scripted lessons encourage passive teaching.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“sheltered classes are for intermediate [language learners], not beginners.” The reason should be obvious: “It is extremely difficult to teach subject matter to those who have acquired none or little of the language. Beginners should be in regular ESL, where they are assured of comprehensible input.”63 Unrealistic language demands create, in effect, a sink-or-swim situation, in which academic learning is minimal.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Well, that’s comforting. A growing body of research suggests that SIOP may not be harmful to English learners and might even be helpful if teachers could only get it right. McIntyre et al. failed to consider another possibility: that these students might have learned more in a well-designed, alternative model of instruction. But SIOP has yet to face such fair competition in any of the studies conducted thus far. Indeed, it appears that none of the comparison students were provided with a clearly defined program for English learners or with teachers who were trained to implement one.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction

“Scaffolding is applied in this context, not to engage students through authentic and meaningful activities, but to transmit a designated set of skills and knowledge. It becomes simply another way to exert control over a lesson, to prevent any deviation from language and content objectives. A more accurate term would be “straitjacketing.”
― James Crawford, The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction