‘Thin Soup’ critiques well-known trainers (Conti, Dellar, Richards, Harmer, Ur, Anderson, Holliday) for SLA claims that are misquoted, unsupported or contradicted by research. Useful less as a verdict than as a checklist for reading any trainer critically.
The specific charges (as Jordan puts them)
- Richards: misrepresents Schmidt’s noticing (Schmidt 2010 excludes “noticing the gap”).
- Dellar: incoherent on emergentism; an L1-transfer anecdote whose errors don’t fit French grammar.
- Ur: claims there’s no particular evidence TBLT beats other teaching; Jordan cites 60+ studies (Bryfonski & McKay 2017).
- Anderson (TATE/TSLT): vague; a synthetic syllabus with tasks added.
- Harmer: praised test algorithms he admitted not understanding.
- Conti: sales rhetoric; self-contradiction.
- Holliday: equates positivism with racism without evidence.
Use it as a method (Claude)
For any trainer claim: (1) find the cited source, (2) check it says that, (3) check it’s still current, (4) look for the counter-literature, (5) separate the evidence from the tone. Jordan’s own style is aggressive (a commenter notes this), so apply the same test to him.
Connections
Research mediators vs craft knowledge - the Penny Ur debate · Teacher trainers should teach the research on interlanguage · Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis - strong and weak versions