Cainntear wrote:The thing is, you can reductio ad absurdum the whole thing, because doing a bunch of grammar exercises beforehand makes pretty much every text more comprehensible.
I wouldn't argue with that. Indeed there's not quite enough talk about what actually happens before anyone is even able to get near any texts/books at all. Every language I've started learning has never been just a matter of 'acquisition', because there is some sort an 'orientation' period (shorter or longer) where you just don't know what is going on, up from down or anything. This requires learning and ordering to some point before you could even have any ability to read anything. Arguably it can be more naturalistic or less so.
Cainntear wrote:This is all well and good, but throughout the thread, the word level seems to be continuing the usage of the term as used be Khayyam in the thread title: "comprehensible input" level -- text at a level where it contains some new language to be acquired and not so much that you get stuck in a dictionary or grammar book. One of the concepts being explored in parts of this thread is what that level actually is.
Yes, a fair objection. These days I care so much less about ordering these sorts of things. 'Level' is a difficult continuum to measure out and 'your level' means to me simply if you can read it or not with some margin for incomprehensibility. What that margin will be seems to differ from person to person according to their tolerance. The high-tolerance learners might want to ask themselves: 'Am I looking up many words per page?' And thereby admitting the text is perhaps too complicated right now. The low-tolerance (perfectionist) learners conceding that looking up a few words every couple of pages isn't 'failure'.
'Levels' as created for class systems are also somewhat arbitrary and only made for logistics reasons. A good teacher can gauge a student's capacities, but we don't always have this luxury.