Le Baron wrote:Cainntear wrote:I think the main thing here is that CI is defined as something you can understand without looking anything up. Anything where you have to look things up isn't CI, and the Krashen line is that this falls into learning about language rather than straight up learning language (he uses the distinction of "learning" vs "acquisition", but that just seems arbitrary semantics to me, and most of the SLA world doesn't make that distinction.)
Whilst it seems fair to state: "CI is something you can understand without looking anything up", the following statement "Anything where you have to look things up isn't CI", is to my mind a reductive false syllogism. This is not really what Krashen said.
I say this because what it boils down to in a real-life scenario is a decision: about whether or not you will make some investigation into the fuzzy edges.
Well this kind of hits my major issue with Krashen -- he said things that sound very clear and definitive, but are in fact very fuzzy indeed. This leaves a lot of teachers actually fighting over what he was saying.
Like his acquisition-learning distinction says that learning never turns to acquisition.
Teacher 1: Krashen says that looking up a dictionary never leads to acquiring a word. Dictionaries are useless.
Teacher 2: Nonono. Krashen says that anything that doesn't make a text comprehensible is useless. Dictionaries can be used to make a text more comprehensible. It's only grammar rules that are useless.
Teacher 1: Nonono. That's learning, not acquisition.
Teacher 2: Nonono. It may seem like learning, but that would only be the case if you stopped after reading the dictionary. It's making the text comprehensible so that you have comprehensible input you can acquire from.
Teacher 3: Ah, but if I present a grammar rule that's going to appear in the lesson text, that makes the text more comprehensible, so it's OK, right?
Teacher 1: No -- looking up stuff is learning, not acquisition.
Teacher 2: No -- looking up words makes input comprehensible; looking up grammar rules doesn't -- that's still learning.
etc
etc
ad nauseum.
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.
It is usually the case that when reading or listening one might not grasp every single thing and this is the case for anything capable of being understood; including information in our own native languages. If you sit through a lecture and then go and read up on what was addressed it wouldn't be because it was 'incomprehensible', but the pursuit of
total comprehension. You might choose not to read or look up anything and still 'comprehend' to an effective level what was put forward in the lecture. Some of your understanding involved more than just the 'meaning' and structure of the words delivered.
As you know I am no Krashen superfan (and I think his approach to what output actually does in language acquisition is very misguided), but here is what he actually says about input:
We acquire, in other words, only when we understand language that contains structure that is "a little beyond" where we are now. How is this possible? How can we understand language that contains structures that we have not yet acquired? The answer to this apparent paradox is that we use more than our linguistic competence to help us understand. We also use context, our knowledge of the world, our extra-linguistic information to help us understand language directed at us...
Principles & Practise, 1982
This involves grasping 'meaning' over pure 'structure'. So in essence ALL CI is beyond a person's 'level' in many respects. All reading and listening and communication is a process of meaning and contextual comprehension.
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.