Sae wrote:Cainntear wrote:Sae wrote:Cainntear wrote:What do you mean when you say "comprehensible input", though? Are you certain that other people mean the same thing as you?
I understand it to be input that is comprehensible. So something you can comprehend or understand and then it is implicit that you don't understand everything, because you're using it in the context of language learning, if you understood everything then you're not learning.
You defined it as meaning something. Full stop. Then you've clarified that you don't actually mean that, and you've alluded to Krashen's own definition.
I do actually mean it.
Breaking it down:
Comprehensible = To be understood, intelligble.
Input = what is taken in
I defined it as "input that is comprehensive" (though obviously meaning, comprehensible)
And something that you "comprehend".
That's pretty definite for meaning IMO.
Perhaps what's throwing this is the fact I include what is implied and later mention it touching the walls Krashen's hypothesis, but I think the point of it touching his hypothesis is because he was careful in his choice of words.
No, it is because your interpretation is highly literal and doesn't include any implications at all that you later go on to list as being implied by the definition.
One the note of the implied meaning: me reading a book in English is also comprehensible. But I already know English, so I'm not learning anything. Likewise when I am reading Vietnamese I 100% understand word for word, I'm not learning anything. So if I am using the 2 words in the context of language learning, I figure it'd be implied that it is comprehensible input for the sake of learning. Which means, there's parts you don't know.
But it's not implied. The term comprehensible input denotes a reified concept -- a "thing". It's a thing, so it's not dependant on context in most people's minds. When you say that material that acts as input and is understood is not "comprehensible input", that like using the term "person" and expecting people to realise you mean a person of a particular ethnicity and religion because it's "implied" by some feature of the context. "Comprehensible input" doesn't make any reference to the context, so you cannot presume that everyone is aware of the intended context. I
And I figure people would mean the same.
Which results in blaming the learner for the failure.
I don't follow. I'm only saying that I think people understand the same meaning. If somebody doesn't understand the same way, no blame here.
I wasn't saying that you were blaming, but that it
results in blaming. What I should have said, though, was that it results in learners
feeling blamed -- that's what I really meant. If you talk in a way that presumes you are understood, there are three groups of listeners: those that understand; those that misunderstand (i.e. think they've understood but haven't); and those the don't understand (and know they don't). The third group may well feel threatened by your implication that they should understand and experience a sense of "blame". The second group may well start to realise that they're in the third group when discussion focuses on what you actually mean, and then you've got the worse problem of "ego-defence" when they refuse to accept the actual meaning and start to defend their misunderstanding. I believe I've seen exactly this happening on this very forum, and I'm absolutely certain I've seen it on various places across the internet.
Maybe you mean Krashen's approaches results in blaming the learner for the failure?
Well it does quite explicitly ("they didn't learn because their affective filters were raised", "they didn't learn because then looked up dictionaries which they shouldn't have done") but again, I want to stress that your post would be taken as a blame by a learner who did not make the same assumptions and implications that you did and that you are implying that any right-minded person would. [Note my deliberate use of the word "imply" to underline the subjectivity of implications and how people's perceptions differ. You might well have taken it as accusation and blame. That was the goal of my demonstration.]
Because we're already touching the walls of Krashen's input hypothesis, because his input hypothesis pretty much says learners improve a language when the input is slightly more advanced than what they know. And is pretty much what is implied by the term.
So you're using the term in a way that purely aligns with Krashen's input hypothesis, and "even though [you] don't follow Krashen[/quote]. The notion of comprehensible input that Krashen puts forth is that we *only* learn by understanding stuff that we don't understand. What's missing from Krashen's stuff is the idea of
automisation. We can strengthen and speed up our reactions if we work at it explicitly.
One of the biggest problems I have with Krashen's input hypothesis is that it says that if I can understand all of the language, it's not "n+1 comprehensible input", and it ignores the length of time it takes me to process it. If I can read something slowly and understand 100% of the language in it, the fact that I
have to read it slowly means that reading it does indeed result in learning, as is evidenced when I'm able to read the next thing quicker.
[snip]
it's a practical impossibility to identify what texts including unknown language *will* result in the meaning of the unknown content being rendered transparent to the learner.
So think about this: if a teacher cannot reliably identify what counts as "comprehensible input", then a learner certainly can't. First up, how do you know it contains enough unknown language to be useful if you haven't actually read it yet? Secondly, once you have read it, how do you know that you haven't assumed an incorrect meaning for the unknown words? Not only can't you tell if it's CI before you read it, but you can't even be sure after you've read it without actually looking everything up in a dictionary or a grammar book.
Krashen's meaning of the term CI is essentially useless in practical terms, and you have essentially presented the term as meaning what he intended it to mean.
This is more to do with Krashen's approach.
No, it's about Krashen's term CI, which agrees with your usage.
I talk about comprehensive input being useful when it is complementary to something else. As I understood, the "comprehensive input hypothesis" part to Krashen's views on language acquisition was just that learners progress their knowledge when comprehensible input that is slightly more advanced than their own.
Yes. He says you can understand 100% of the meaning without understanding 100% of the language. Comprehensible input is anything where you don't understand 100% of the language but do understand 100% of the meaning. I am arguing that this is an unmeasurable concept. I cannot reliably identify whether any given student of mine will understand 100% of the meaning of a given text -- I simply cannot. And I definitely cannot identify if a foreign book is "comprehensible" to me without first attempting to read the whole thing to see if I do, in fact, comprehend it. So even if "comprehensible input" is effective, it cannot be part of a strategy.
It is possible to apply that hypothesis differently. Hence my saying 'touching the walls' because my own approach doesn't follow Krashen beyond that and looking at some popular Krashenites, it is the same too.
...which brings me back to the fact that the term CI was invented by Krashen to assert ownership over something which teachers were already doing: giving out reading material "at the students' level" or "appropriate to the students' level". When I've said this before I've had people insisting that it's actually "slighty above the students' level" because the level is "n" and the CI is "n+1", so Krashen has been very successful in placing the idea that what everybody did before him was wrong and too simple, when in reality good teachers would do the right thing and make it just the right level of difficulty.
For example, if you look at what Matt vs Japan helped put together with Refold. They suggest the idea of "priming", which is spending time getting familiar with words from a deck and some of the basic grammar. Not to memorise through spaced repetition but to be familiar enough that you might start to recognise it in something you're watching or listening to. And they also encourage 2 types of 'input', one is active ands the other is passive and it's in the active approach where you end up looking up words. As for example, you might be on YouTube and using something like Language Reactor or Migaku to mine from the subtitles and go through a video at your own pace. Whereas passive, is well, you don't do anything but have it playing.
Yes, this maybe does run in conflict to some of what Krashen has said, but it is also somebody who puts emphasis on comprehensive input and is a Krashenite.
It's someone who
calls himself a Krashenite. I find it really helps identify pseudoscience when people who have a fundamental disagreement with the core philosophy still name themselves as following it.
How is "refold" different from the much-maligned grammar translation method?
Kids learning Latin and Greek in schools for centuries would be drilled in the words and grammar that they would need in order to understand the end-of-unit passage from a classical text. Is that not priming? If the difference is only that the learner doesn't deliver a translation of the passage at the end of the lesson, that's not a real difference, IMO. In grammar translation, the actual translation gives the teacher a way to verify student understanding. Badly done, it becomes mechanical, but well done, it leads to good acquisition. My father learned French by grammar-translation, and he can hold fairly good conversations in French, because he didn't do it mechanically. He believes that his French is proof that the old ways were better. IMO, this is a case of "well it worked for me" and a failure to recognise "it worked because I didn't do what I was asked" -- and as far as I can see, everything that works typically works because the learner doesn't strictly follow the instructions given (maybe to a lesser extent with Michel Thomas, but it's still true of MT).
He seems to use some of the things he has said in a different way, and it would potentially help with the problem you're describing. And this doesn't change what is meant by "comprehensible input" either, unless your meaning is "inclusive of everything Krashen said".
As above, Krashen defined CI as anything inherently 100% understanding of meaning despite <100% understanding of language. If you have to study grammar to get it, that's not CI by Krashen's definition. So what definition is it CI under? Does it differ from how teaching has occurred for millennia? If not, why does the chang of terminology follow Krashen?
I know there is emphasis to try deter you away from word lookup or learning grammar, but even hearing both Matt and Olly talk on it, it sounds more to deter dependencies on it, but not to exclude it from their approaches.
The key defining factor of "comprehensible input" is that the input should be *inherently* comprehensible.
I am not great at memorising vocabulary. The main thing is, I have to be engaged with whatever method I am using. I will still do my best to use things like spaced repetition, but I doesn't often stick and I find I do better with methods that are more engaging. This is one of the things that can end up engaging for me.
So in what way is it useful?
I have content I am engaging with that I am able to mostly or partially follow. And thus it is something my brain can engage with.
Then I argue that you're focusing on the wrong thing. What you are describing is quite simply that language divorced from meaning is meaningless and pointless. I would agree. Memorising vocabulary is pretty pointless because isolating words divorces them from meaning. Those who do well with memorisation do, I believe, mentally pull up other things -- examples, commone collocations/phrases, related terms -- in order to add to the meaning as they do the memorisation. I certainly did, and I drastically reduced the amount of memorisation I did because I released how little point there was to it.
Learning lists means memorising words you don't really have anything to associate with -- looking up words when you need them means you have a good degree of associations to a very concrete context, and that helps.
But I ask: how long has it taken us to get to the heart of the matter -- the notion that language can't be learned divorced from thinking about meaning?
Because as I see it, it was the lack of discussion of this deep point that leads to the "Krashen vs mainstream" opposition. It's at the heart of Krashen's thinking, but he leapt to the conclusion that meaningless learning was inherent to traditional teaching and he declared that "his way" was the only cure. If he had made a distinction between the problem and the proposed solution, he could have moved the whole sphere further forward. Or actually no, he probably couldn't, because it wouldn't have been an attention-grabbing, "sexy" claim. Because... guess what...? Lots of people talk about it but don't get attention, which means that it isn't even talked about by most teachers.