Stephen Krashen
Stephen Krashen is an American linguist and educator whose name became almost synonymous with the great input turn in late twentieth-century SLA. Born in Chicago in 1941, he earned his doctorate in linguistics at UCLA and went on to teach at the University of Southern California, where he later became Professor Emeritus of Education.
Krashen's public career has had two strikingly different registers. In academic work, he is the author most closely associated with the Monitor Model, Comprehensible Input, the Input Hypothesis, and the Affective Filter. In public argument, he has also been a tireless advocate for bilingual education, literacy, and free voluntary reading. He writes with the assurance of someone who has been debated for decades and knows perfectly well that being challenged is part of the job.
Career
- PhD in linguistics from UCLA
- Taught at the University of Southern California, moving from linguistics into education
- Became one of the most visible public intellectuals in language education, especially on reading and bilingual education
- Remained active well beyond formal retirement through essays, talks, and open-access writing
Published Work
- Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning (1981)
- Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (1982)
- The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications (1985)
- Free Voluntary Reading (2004)
Influence
- One of the most influential and debated figures in modern language education
- Helped shift whole generations of teachers toward input, reading, and lower-anxiety classroom environments
- Even critics continue to define their positions in relation to him, which is influence of a very durable kind