Krashen and Ancient Greek teaching methods

Greek Learning Greek
1

The other Krashen thread got side tracked (and with hindsight I see that was my fault because of the way I opened the topic). However, can I ask that people only post here if they want to talk about Krashen’s views on language acquisition.

But this part of Joel’s was related to Krashen

You have taken that bit out of context. He is very specific that in the normal course of events being exposed to comprehensible input will lead to acquisition and hence competance. However, a blocker can derail that. Those three points are what make up the blocker. Krashen makes no claims that those apply to any other context (though it is true he doesn’t say they don’t either).

The key claim is that only comprehensible input will allow significant language acquisition. I added significant because he will, when pressed, concede that maybe grammar study can provide say 5% with the rest arising from comprehensible input. (He also says that for to work you have to find grammar fascinating but I think that is true of almost everyone here.)

The blocker is relevant because according to Krashen if it cuts in when you are exposed to comprehensible input then you get no benefit from the comprehensible input.

In some ways his claim that comprehensible input is the method of acquiring a language is quite hopeful for us who are learning a dead language. He says there is not need to speak the language. Output is the result of acquisition not the cause. He also says both spoken and written comprehensible input will do just as well. He argues that free voluntary reading is an ideal way to gain competance. Given that, he argues, near native speaker competence is possible.

To create a diverse library of graded readers is perfectly possible. If what Krashen says is true then the fact we are learning a language that no longer has native speakers should not be the handicap that it often is claimed to be.

2

Hi all, I just took a quick look at the Krashen book linked on the other related thread: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf . I skipped to the section “D. Characteristics of Optimal Input for Acquisition” starting pg 62 and only focused on the positive recommendations and not the things to avoid, to work out how this would be applied to ancient Greek. Here’s my very quick summary (as I said I only looked at that small section and so if there’s anything elsewhere that override this, I’m missing it). NB I’m not judging Krashen’s method, just thinking through how someone could practically apply it today to ancient Greek:

Recommendations

  1. Use these linguistic aids to comprehension:
    “(1) slower rate and clearer articulation, which helps acquirers to identify word boundaries more easily, and allows more processing time;
    (2) more use of high frequency vocabulary, less slang, fewer idioms;
    (3) syntactic simplification, shorter sentences.    ” (pg 64)
    Obviously only (2) and (3) are relevant to written materials.

  2. Use pictures and objects non-linguistic aids to comprehension: “In my view, providing extra-linguistic support in the form of realia and pictures for beginning classes is not a frill, but a very important part of the tools the teacher has to encourage language acquisition. The use of objects and pictures in early second language instruction corresponds to the caretaker’s use of the “here and now” in encouraging first language acquisition, in that they all help the acquirer understand messages containing structures that are “a little beyond” them.” (pg 66)

  3. Choose as the subject what that the student is interested in reading in their native language: “Certainly, discussing or reading about a topic that is totally unknown will make the message harder to understand. There is a danger, however, in making the input too “familiar”. If the message is completely known, it will be of no interest, and the student will probably not attend. We want the student to focus on the message, and there must be some message, something that the student really wants to hear or read about” (pg 66) … “Some other fairly widespread input types that fall short of the mark of true relevance are the reading assignments that most foreign language students work through in introductory courses. Generally, these selections bear very little resemblance to the kind of reading the students would do in their first language on their own time.” (pg 67)

  4. Get a sufficient quantity – only rough guidelines are available for now, until further empirical data are obtained:

  • Firstly, to get to a basic stage where the student will reply in the language: around 10 hours, by analogy with another technique: “As we will see in Chapter V, the chief virtue of Total Physical Response may be its ability to supply concentrated comprehensible input. Asher has noted in several papers (reviewed in Chapter V) that TPR students are generally ready to start production in the target language after about ten hours of Total Physical Response input.” (pg 72)
  • Secondly, to get to a higher stage of proficiency: much more content but likely less than 1,950 hours (the upper bound for learning “exotic” languages using sub-optimal methods: “We know even less about the amount of low filter/comprehensible input necessary for progress to higher levels of competence. We can get some idea from the United States Foreign Service Institute chart, an estimate of the amount of class time necessary to achieve a FSI 2+ rating in different foreign languages (2+ is defined as “halfway between minimal professional proficiency and working professional proficiency”, Diller, 1978, p. 100) for adult English speakers. According to the Foreign Service Institute estimates (reproduced in Diller, 1978), European languages such as German, French, and Italian require approximately 720 hours of classtime for the “average” student to attain the 2+ level, while more “exotic” languages (such as Arabic, Korean, and Chinese) require 1950 hours of classtime.14 These figures may, however, represent an upper bound. They are based on “classroom hours”, which, if traditional methods are employed, may not entail optimal input.” (pg 72)
  • These are all time-based quantities. You’d then need to work out the number of words read per hour to figure out the target word count. A quick google suggests that the average reading rate (at the lower end of the ranges) is around 200 words a minute for non-technical material or 50 words a minute for technical material. Probably safest to assume the slower reading rate as if technical material. This suggests that you’d need 50 x 60 = 3,000 words per hour of reading material and so (to get to the 10 hour basic level) 30,000 words or (to get to the 1,950 hour upper bound for higher proficiency) 5,850,000 words.

Takeaways

  • Based on 4 above, building sufficient comprehensible input would be a massive undertaking – I just tried to quickly guesstimate the total number of words of the Platonic dialogues (excluding letters) and it came out at about 588,000 words, i.e. just over 10% of the 5.85m word upper bound for higher proficiency. Even writing 30,000 words (to get to the basic level) would still take a lot of time.
  • Therefore if people want comprehensible input in the near future, mining available content is going to be the most fruitful approach.
  • Starting from 3 (interesting content) makes you lean towards literary texts. We all know how hard these are.
  • Starting from 1 and 2 then, rather than 3, immediately makes me think of non-literary texts. What has high frequency vocab, simple grammatical structures, and pictures? Euclid’s Elements comes to mind. This would at least get to over the 30,000 word basic proficiency threshold. To then broaden out, you could then also mine other mathematical and technical texts, and other non-literary sources, e.g. inscriptions (records of names and events would be repetitive content), non-literary letters, etc.
  • If these seem too boring as the sole reading diet (i.e. breaching 3 above), you could slowly build up in parallel paraphrases of interesting texts using a limited vocabulary. E.g. paraphrase Iliad A using only the vocab on the Eton Greek word list. But focusing on building this content alone would mean you might wait years to get a small quantity of text when mathematical and other technical texts could build up your word count much more quickly.

Recommendations for ancient Greek reading materials (if someone wanted to start now)

  • Read the Greek-English vocab for Euclid here, starting pg 540: http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/Books/Euclid/Elements.pdf
  • Then read as much Euclid as possible
  • Then if you start getting bored, do two things: (1) try to find some other good non-literary content, and (2) make sure you know all the vocab on the Eton word list here: http://www.etoncollege.com/userfiles/files/AS%20Word%20List.pdf, and then try to paraphrase for yourself something you find interesting using only the words on that list (of course, you could choose any other list) – I guess it would be fine to also include proper names (maybe linked pictures would be helpful.

Cheers, Chad

3

I really appreciate any engagement with Krashen’s ideas but especially such a thoughtful response as you have given.

Krashen does often say that he has done the easy part -to show what is needed.
He then admits that is the teachers who have the really hard task to produce the required comprehensible input.

I had not taken the time to work out how huge a task it would be. But getting to the basic level is doable. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is 75,000 words -twice the basic level. Sadly Andrew Wilson did his translation with an eye to being a modern Lucian rather than helping learners - it is the hardest Greek I have ever read.

But it is quite possible that someone like Andrew Wilson with time on their hands could be inspired to take on a task that large but using simple Greek. But that is unlikely to occur unless there is a widespread consensus that easy readers that is to say “comprehensible input” are necessary.


But note this:

That is the danger of adaptions/paraphrases. That is especially true of a work so famous as the Illiad. Almost all learners whose motive is to read Homer’s actual words will have read the Iliad in translation and indeed several translations. I suspect this is why I find light adaptions harder than real Greek. Perhaps the Greek is a tiny bit easier but my motivation plummets so that difficulties that I would be able overcome with toil in real Greek become unsurmountable problems for me when I encounter them in adaptions.

When reading Greek that is truly easy I still prefer fresh material but as I have the confidence that I can read an easy adaption my lower motivation is less of a problem.

But the further you get from the subject matter of the Greek texts the less the chance that someone studying Ancient Greek.

Some time ago I started to write about a battle fought by the 8th Army in 1941 http://discourse.textkit.com/t/operation-crusader-in-ancient-greek-verb-practice-part-1/12794/1 I took it for granted that anyone who is interested in the Anabasis of Kuros would be interested in the adventures of the 8th Army in the Western Desert. But while other of my writings attracted corrections this one did not. As I don’t think the interests of those competent to make corrections and beginners differs greatly I take it as a sign that my theme was too far distant from the interests of the average student of Greek.

But an account of the Battle of Marathon in easy Ancient Greek but rather than following Herodotos following the reconstruction of a modern historian might well strike the balance between freshness and familiarity.

I never have looked at Euclid. I have heard that he is easy but people say that Xenophon is easy and for me he is not. And while I am not maths-phobic neither does it grab me. But should have at least tried him out.

Krashen regards memorizing words as of little value. According to him the way we learn words is through free reading. How effective do you find learning word lists? When you are reading Ancient Greek at the same time as you are memorizing word lists it is of course difficult to say which caused a word to stick in your mind. But are you able to retain words in your mind that you do not subsequently encounter in reading?

4

David,

I listened to one of his intro lectures. There were several things I found useful and one or two surprises. When asked what was the only effective means of acquiring a language I thought the answer was going to be reading/hearing and then imitation. His answer was understanding. I find that most of his points are not controversial at all. Does anyone really think you consciously apply rules when reading or speaking? I agree that the only way to pick up vocab is by (free) reading and more (free) reading. Forget flash cards and memorization.

Should we create artificially palatable texts for optimal learning experience? I don’t think you can engineer a text and have it be a text worth reading. Having to struggle through difficult literary texts to pick up strange new idioms is not inherently incompatible with “free” reading. Some people just read Shakespeare for fun. Others read Thucydides or Sophocles. Recently I have been reading Euripides who is more accessible than the other guys.

5

Hi, three points in reply to your post above: on word lists, on future comprehensible input resources and (from the other related thread) on learning plateaus.

Word lists: You asked whether I think it’s worth reading word lists. Yes I do think so, even if you don’t come across those words in the near future. But that’s not why I referred to two word lists above – I’ll come back to that point but first deal with the two word lists I referred to:

  • The first was a word list for Euclid (where I recommended reading Euclid straight after), i.e. spend an hour or so max reading the word list then dive into Euclid. I think a blocker for Euclid might be getting stuck in the definitions when you get to the 2D objects – once you get past that it’s comprehensible input I think and so the word list is just to get you over that initial hurdle. i.e. you’re going to come across the Euclid vocab from the word list very quickly.
  • The second word list I referred to was for a closed set of vocab to be used (if someone wanted to do this, although for reasons I explained above and will go into further below I don’t know if this is the best use of effort) to produce comprehensible input. i.e. take any list of say 1,000 frequently-occurring words, and generate all your comprehensible input texts out of that closed set of words. That way, you would know even before opening a comprehensible input text whether you’re up to the level (in terms of vocab) – if you’ve mastered those 1,000 words, you’re not going to have any vocab problems as you read. That was the idea. I’ve recommended before on this board learning all the vocab for a text (if you can) before reading, to take away the dictionary work interrupting the flow of reading.

To come back to the first point, I do think it’s also useful to spend bits of time reading word lists even where you don’t encounter the words in the near future. Why? It depends on what you do in your head when you come across a word you don’t recognise. I’ve tried to watch the process in my head and I think I do this: first I seem to try to fetch the word from my memory, but if it’s not there I then analyse the word into its components and see whether I recognise all/many of those and then try to either remember the word through that second route or at least guess the meaning using those hints. Reading good word lists/lexica helps you practice that analysis skill so that you’re better at doing it when you’re actually reading.

Future comprehensible input: For the reasons I explained above I think it would take a long time to generate sufficient comprehensible input in ancient Greek and so the best thing to do today is to dig deeper into the technical/non-literary resources out there to find things that are readable. But do I think the ultimate goal should be for teachers today to generate in parallel a large amount of comprehensible input (as a side exercise in Greek prose comp)? Not personally. The reason is I have a certain idea how future learning may/should look and this type of content generation wouldn’t be optimal. Let’s say you did want to get to the 1,950 hours (approx 5.8 million words of comprehensible input) or, say, another figure that’s been thrown around (although there’s debate around this) 10,000 hours (around the 30 million word mark). Is this possible? From what I understand about machine learning, yes it will be. Will teachers do this? Unlikely, and even if they did, it wouldn’t be as good as the hope I have in mind for the future.

My hope is that future students will engage with something like a comprehensible input engine (rather than a static comprehensible input text). Ancient Greek has a large data set over which unsupervised learning could crunch away and identify patterns and eventually produce content consistent with the patterns. The learning engine would then put content at you (say someone speaking to you in a virtual/augmented environment) and you’d engage, and each engagement would lead the engine to slightly optimise your learning path (like gradient descent). Millions of interactions would mean millions of optimisation iterations. I imagine that it will be really cool to say learn about battle strategies sitting behind the general on his horse and watching it unfold in front of you as he shouts commands etc. Underlying it will be however a teaching engine that is continually being optimised for your personal engagement. What a one-on-one teacher today does basically.

This may then lead to a flipping around of what teachers do (as at least one online learning platform has talked about) – currently a lot of teacher time is dedicated to delivering “passive content” (in addition to the active engagement in class), and then kids go home and do the real application, homework, on their own. Instead you could have the homework (the “on their own” time) with a teaching engine delivering in a continually optimised way) the “passive content”, and then the school time (with human teachers) would be like homework today, but under the supervision and guidance of a human teacher rather than puzzling through it at night alone without human guidance.

So for these reasons I don’t think human teachers today spending their time to produce massive quantities of comprehensible input would be the best use of resources – my guess/hope is that machine learning will cover that off (30 million+ words of interactive content may be easily done in the near future), and classics teachers should ideally stick to doing what they do best now, guiding students through the tricky bits. (I’m guessing this is what they do! I’ve never had a classics teacher.)

Learning plateaus: This comes down to expectations and processes:

  • Expectations: When I look back to 6 years into classics, I think, that’s still “entry level”, only a few years in. Kids who start when they’re 7 are around 13 years old after 6 years of learning classics. There’s still a long way to go for them. I guess I think about classics in the same way as say professions – after 6 years there’s often still a long way to go to get to comfortable proficiency. So not feeling proficient after 6 years isn’t a sign of anything for me – I wouldn’t expect to feel proficient by then. I don’t expect to feel proficient for years, and so it doesn’t bother me as much – if you compare your timeline for proficiency to say learning French, you may have too high expectations and ask yourself why you’re failing, but if you instead compare your timeline for proficiency to say medicine, your expectations may come closer to the real timeline.
  • Processes: If you’re not retaining what you’ve learnt when you go back to re-read it, that’s a knowledge capture issue, i.e. a process issue. Perhaps ask yourself, what are your directly doing to capture your knowledge so as to make the next read through easier? Simply “learning/memorising/translating” isn’t doing anything direct, that’s indirect. What are you directly doing for knowledge capture? What materials are you creating for your second iteration of the read through, e.g. materials you will read before your second read through, or margin notes to consult during your second read through? (I’ve done both facing the same problem.) First try to find out what process issues might be causing you to get stuck. I wouldn’t consult secondary sources for this though: diagnose yourself by continuing to read primary texts and figuring out exactly what in your mind is triggering the blank/hurdle (vocab? Grammar? Syntax? Word order? What the pronoun is referring to? Particles? Prepositions? Etc.) I did this and found that it was vocab for me.

Cheers, Chad

6

Word lists:
Yes I can see that learning words immediately before reading could have good points. Words that I attempt to learn without a context I just forget.

Computer generated input. I may not fully grasp what you are proposing but… Okay, it is true computers have begun to simulate language more and more so that computers capable of passing a Turing test are no longer out of the question. But if you fed Thucydides and Plato into a computer would it really produce comprehensible output?

Plateau: Its not slow progress that is my problem but no perceptible progress at all. And I save everything I read for future re-reading along with notes.

On getting more input - it would help a great deal if more Ancient Greek classes were like Pollis. Rico’s book is short and covers too much ground to allow the repetition needed to make his book easy to understand without resort to the dictionary. His classes are a different matter. I did think that it was a weakness of his method that in his classes the individual students don’t often get to speak. If Stephen Krashen is right then that’s ideal. Indeed watching a series of youtube videos might well be almost as good as actually being there. Perhaps Rico could be persuaded to put a whole term online (rather the couple of samples that we now have). If it were behind a paywall it would be worth paying the subscription.

7

Last night at the local library picked up a book[1] by a famous (?) author who speaks English as her first language, a second generation daughter of Bengali immigrants. A some point in the 90’s she decides to dabble in Italian, takes instruction from a string of tutors, works on it for twenty years, goes to Rome, can hardly order a glass of wine in Italy. Struggles with real dialog in Italy, more tutors. She must have made a lot of money on her english novels, pricey lifestyle, living in Rome, private instruction. Then she takes up writing in Italian.

If you think that other people aren’t having trouble with learning languages this is a good read. Its short, I’ve read half of it already. Get it from your library. Not a book you will read twice.



[1] In Other Words
Jhumpa Lahiri 2016.

Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 0345810090 (print)
9780345810090 (print)
1101875550 (hardcover)
9781101875551 (hardcover)
Branch Call Number: B LAHIRI ITALIAN ENGLISH
Characteristics: xiv, 233 pages ; 22 cm
Additional Contributors: Goldstein, Ann 1949-- Translator

8

I find that most of his points are not controversial at all. Does anyone really think you consciously apply rules when reading or speaking? I agree that the only way to pick up vocab is by (free) reading and more (free) reading. Forget flash cards and memorization.

Most people don’t disagree with Krashen’s basic idea, i.e. that being exposed to large quantities of language that you can actually understand is beneficial. So in that sense he’s not controversial.
What many don’t agree with, however, is that comprehensible input on its own is sufficient for language acquisition and that explicit teaching and practicing grammar don’t really do anything in terms of language acquisition.

I don’t think many people believe learners should consciously apply rules when speaking or reading, but rather that they first have to consciously learn a rule and then practice it until it becomes automatic and they don’t have to think about it anymore. According to Krashen, this doesn’t work because he claims that learned knowledge can’t become acquired knowledge, an idea that is called the no-interface position.

You can read more about that debate here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_position

9

To consciously apply rules when reading is exactly what was being taught during the summer school I attended. It is also the only way I can get to understand any of the extant texts. If Krashen is right, I will not ever acquire Greek reading the extant texts - because I am always focused on the form and not the meaning. When I finally prized the meaning through applying the rules I may well have learned something new about the language but I have not acquired it.

People have different abilities. You are especially able and can focus on the meaning rather than the form even reading the extant texts. Hence for you it is possible to acquire more Greek by reading the extant texts.

Krashen says easy texts is what is needed he then adds that as those texts must also be engaging this is going to be a difficult task. But I think the secret of doing that is for the writer to focus on the meaning. If the writer has something to say or a story to say then the writer will find some way to covey that even if they are very constrained in what linguistic forms they can use to express that.

But Krashen also says that the texts must not be too easy. If the texts are too easy and there are no forms or vocabulary to be learned. Acquisition happens when the texts are a bit of a struggle but not so hard that the conscious mind kicks in. It sounds to me that Euripides is roughly that level of difficulty.

I’m really sorry I have taken so long to reply - I didn’t see your post first time and reading it I find very thoughtful pushing the debate forward.

10

step one: work through a basic textbook to learn the grammar and morphology.
step two: read & study texts using good commentaries.
step three: repeat step two. The more you do, and the longer you do it, the better your acquision will be.

11

You are using acquisition in the sense that Krashen uses learning. According to Krashen the language is only acquired when you grasp the meaning without conscious application of your knowledge. Once you turn to a commentary you are no longer using your intuitive feel for the language to grasp meaning.

If you disagree with Krashen on this, by all means put your arguments here but please do listen/read enough of what he is saying to know what you are disagreeing with.

12

I’m with Dante.

(Copied from the Composition forum:)
Krashen maintains that listening and reading, unlike speaking and writing (output not input), let along studying grammar, lead to language acquisition. That leaves interactive communication out of the equation. But anyway, our problem is special, in that we don’t have a bunch of ancient Greeks to listen to or to communicate with. So that leaves reading. Krashen pushes “free voluntary reading,” and I’m fully behind him, though we hardly need the qualifiers. Read, read, read, read freely, read widely, read fast, read slow. The more ancient Greek we read, the more ancient Greek we’ll acquire.

But what’s needed is “comprehensible input,” you say. Well, yes and no. Of course it needs to become comprehensible. But the distinction between (subconsciously) acquiring a language and (consciously) learning a language is a rather contrived and artificial one, and necessarily breaks down when it comes to a dead language like ancient Greek. As does your objection to “decoding.” Language is a code, and any act of reading is an act of decoding, conscious or not. The more we read (and the better our learnt and/or acquired knowledge of the language), the less conscious the decoding becomes.

13

I would add that many of the ancient Greek texts we want to be able to read inevitably require a certain amount of “decoding,” and sometime a lot of it. I doubt that anyone can read odes of Pindar, dramatic choruses, speeches of Thucydides, Lycophron, and other difficult texts that are obscure, linguistically, with regard to content, and even textually, with the same degree of fluency that we can read modern languages we’ve acquired, i.e., without some amount of “conscious application of knowledge.”

After all specialists who have spent their careers on these texts frequently disagree sharply on interpretation, and not just on interpretation, but on the words of the text itself.

14

If I ever become fluent at reading the Attic authors, I wouldn’t mind having to struggle a bit with Pindar.

15

And even highly educated ancient Greeks had to engage in a certain amount of decoding to understand (or misunderstand) some of these texts. Dionysius on Thucydides:


εὐαρίθμητοι γάρ τινές εἰσιν οἷοι πάντα τὰ Θουκυδίδου συμβαλεῖν, καὶ οὐδ᾽ οὗτοι χωρὶς ἐξηγήσεως γραμματικῆς ἔνια.

“The number of those who are able to understand all of Thucydides is very limited, and even they can’t do it without resorting to grammatical commentary from time to time.”

16

You could say the same thing about Shakespeare. And while I certainly need textual notes every so often with Shakespeare, I would still claim that I read him fluently. Nor would I find “decoding” a descriptive word to describe my romping through Hamlet.

17

What makes Thucydides occasionally difficult is the compression or downright obscurity of his thought, but only from time to time. With Pindar it’s different. Once you understand the epinician program (the object is to glorify the victor—and the poet—without antagonizing the gods) it’s relatively easy to decipher the poetic code. αριστον μεν υδωρ is not a plain statement about water. Both composers (like Shakespeare) can stretch the language beyond its normal limits, so that can be challenging too, but the difficulty of reading either one of them can easily be exaggerated.
But to reassert my point, a linguistic truism: all reading is decoding, whether we think of it that way or not.

18

And all listening is decoding too, I suppose, from sound waves to thought. But there is a substantial difference between decoding something consciously and relying on and training the part of our brain that does it in an automated way.

Here are a few great conscious decoding tricks:

  1. Sentence diagramming
  2. Looking ahead for the verb
  3. Writing down the english meaning of harder words

In my opinion, and I think that it follows Krashen’s general advice, all three of the above would be actively harmful in achieving unconscious fluency.

I think that the danger of a word like “decode” to describe reading, is that it equates spending an hour on a single sentence far above one’s level, perhaps using all of the above tricks and more, to spending the same time reading through dozes of paragraphs, looking up perhaps a word or two every sentence. The second activity is extremely useful. The first is fun, like crossword puzzles or sudoku, but doesn’t help much towards fluency, in my opinion.

19

@mwh: It’s true that the difficulties of Thucydides’ speeches and Pindar are different and need to be approached in ways that are specific to those texts. But personally, while I feel I can read a fair amount of Attic prose with some fluency, I certainly don’t romp through Thucydides and Pindar and dramatic choruses the way Joel apparently romps through Shakespeare.

Frankly, I’d be lost without commentaries, and I have to work at understanding the texts, not always successfully. And I suspect that most of us (mwh excepted) have to “consciously apply rules when reading” ancient Greek texts, and to use a commentary, to some extent or other.

Engaging with ancient Greek texts is different from learning a modern language.

20

This above is the bit at the start of you reply in the other forum. You have actually engaged with Krashen which is more than his other critics. However, I still don’t know what linguistic theory you base your criticism nor what research you feel is relevant. The wikipedia page simply says there are people who disagree with Krashen. So…?

The page does give Robert DeKeyser as holding the opposite point of view and yes there is a link to some research involving an artificial “language” of 98 words. I could explain why I don’t find that convincing but I have no idea as to whether you take the relevance of such research more seriously than I do.

learning: memorize grammar rules then analyze sentences to work out which rule applies in each case
Acquiring: Read texts that is sufficiently easy that you grasp the meaning. Make sure that those texts are a bit harder than you are comfortable with. Keep reading until those bits that become second nature and then go on to harder texts. Repeat

How is that an artificial distinction? If you gave a person an MRI doing those tasks do you really believe the same parts of the brain would light up?

1)Reading a texts that is so difficult that you have to resort a commentary for grammar explanations, so hard that you have to look up most of the words (and check cases/tense etc) and so hard that you have to go though a process of laborious analysis before all those elements can be knocked in something meaningful.
2) Reading a text that is sufficiently easy that you just get the meaning, apart from some more difficult bits that you can guess at. Keep upping the difficulty so that there is always something which is more a guess than something you are certain about.

How does that distinction in any way change simply because somewhere on this planet there may be living people speaking that language as a first language?

If you really think that there is no the distinction between reading and decoding it forces me to the conclusion that you took to Ancient Greek so easily that you have never had the experience of decoding. Your ability to spot someones difficulty with ease suggests a deeper feel for Ancient Greek than simply a memorization of Smythe would give you.