You probably know Michael Jordan, Bruce Lee and Bill Gates, don’t you? Have you ever heard of Tiger Woods, Nadia Comaneci or The Beatles? All those people have something in common: they succeeded in their field/area. They not only succeeded, they succeeded extremely well, so that nowadays they are considered geniuses. What many language learners don’t know is that there are many language learning geniuses out there. Those guys have learned so many languages, they have done so well in theirs studies, they went so hardcore that ended up understand exactly how language and language learning works. It’s almost you duty as a serious language learner to know those guys, at the very least to have heard of them.

At the university I had taken so many literature classes. In these classes we had to read classical literature, we have to read the works from the masters, the big guys (the unique problem is that there are so many big guys in literature…). In the same way, you have to read/know the big language learning guys. Hopefully they are in minor number than the literature folks. It’s weird why we don’t study those guys at the university. For instance, at least here in Brazil, language students usually have no clue about who is Stephen Krashen. Notice that Krashen should be known since he is in the academic field! But people like Steve Kaufmann or Stu Jay Raj are totally unknown between most of language students. University language teachers should start studying more languages and language learning (and less linguistics) and set up programs that make students aware of all those language masters.

This is an introduction to a series of articles about the people I call language learning grand masters. We gonna start with Stephen Krashen, since he is quoted by all others grand masters I know. I hope you like it! Stay tuned!