Professor emeritus Stephen D. Krashen of Southern California University was invited to present in two seminars at HKU co-organized by a SCOLAR project (named Supporting Non-Chinese Speaking Secondary Students to Learn Chinese as a Second Language) of CACLER and Bring Me a Book ** entitled “Compelling Reading and Problem-Solving: the Route to High Levels of Language, Literacy and Life Competence” mainly for teachers and educators on 22nd April 2017, and “How We Get Literate and How We Get Smart” for the parents on 25th April 2017, making up the audience of more than 17o in-service teachers, educators, students and parents.

Professor Krashen is a renowned scholar in the fields of second language acquisition and he promotes the learning impact of comprehensible input and free voluntary reading in the past decade. In the first seminars, he emphasized the importance of reading and problem-solving which are compelling to be self-selected, limited to narrow domain and intense interest. In the second seminar, he pointed out that people find their interests and gain valuable knowledge by starting out with great deal of reading, and trying to solve problems of great interest to them.  

We are grateful to Professor Krashen for rushing to the first seminar right after his arrival at the airport in the morning 22nd April, and greatly impressed by his energetic and relaxed mood of playing ‘Over the rainbow’ on the piano at lunch right after the seminar.

To review the wonderful moments of the two seminars, please visit http://www.cacler.hku.hk/en/research/project/pocsl/

** Founded in 2006, Bring Me a Book Hong Kong  is a non- profit organization and an affiliate of Bring Me A Book™ Foundation, which is a 501 (c) (3) award winning literacy non-profit headquartered in Mountain View, CA, USA.