CI/Compelling or Comprehensible Input in Language Learning
Comprehensible compelling input is fine, but it's something where we need an assist. Hi there Steve Kaufmann here today and I'm going to talk to you today about CI, which can be compelling input or comprehensible input. And I'm going to talk about the limits of CI. Uh, remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications.
Uh, if you're on a podcast service, uh, you know, please leave a review. I appreciate it. So, uh, if you follow me on these, on my YouTube channel, you'll know that I'm a great believer in Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis that we learn languages through input. And that ideally that input should be, and input means essentially listening and reading, um, that that input should be comprehensible and meaningful and ideally compelling. And so this then is the term CI and there's a whole range of teaching activities that have developed around this concept of creating CI, compelling or comprehensible, of course, for input to be compelling, it has to be comprehensible. It can be comprehensible and boring.
But it can't be, it's difficult for it to be compelling and not comprehensible. Uh, although it can be of great interest, but you don't fully understand it. So to that extent, it's semi comprehensive, but very compelling. But at any rate CI, ingesting comprehensible, compelling input, meaningful messaging as Krashen refers to it.
The more of this quantity of meaningful messages we get the more our brain starts to become familiar with the language and we acquire words and familiarity with the language. And eventually we end up being able to speak the language. So I do believe in the power of CI and I think these methods, new methods of language instruction built around CI are good, but I also feel there are certain limits.
First of all, when we start in a new language, nothing is comprehensible because you don't know the language, you're starting at zero. Obviously if you're going from Spanish to Portuguese, some things are comprehensible. At least when you read, even as an English speaker, if we see something in French or Spanish, there are words there that we recognize.
So some things are comprehensible but generally speaking, especially if we're listening to it, it's not comprehensible. So to start off, you know, right at the beginning, you know, we can start with comprehensible input. So we have to have some way of getting, you know, stepping ourselves up, empowering ourselves up to a point where we are actually able to deal with comprehensible input.
As I've said, that's where I use the mini stories at LingQ. Because the... and I like the idea of a lot of repetition. I have a high degree of tolerance for repetition of relatively uninteresting content, because I'm very motivated at first to at least get a toehold in the language. After a while, I get tired of this, but initially I'm quite capable of subjecting myself to, uh, repetitive content, repetitive listening, repetitive reading, looking up words, uh, in order to get a toehold to the language. The second thing about comprehensible input, and I've read now quite a bit on the subject, people like Paul Nation in New Zealand and others, uh, there's a lot of raw material available on the internet. If you search comprehensible input, extensive reading, uh, you can find lots of information.
And one of the sort of traditional approaches to this idea of, of using input to acquire the language is to say that using the example of the native speaker who apparently learns a thousand words a year and the native speaker learns a thousand words a year because the native speaker has so much exposure to his or her own language, whether it be listening or reading.
And so the native speaker doesn't need to look words up the native speaker can infer meaning, can guess at meaning, gets these words in so many different contexts that they simply become part of the sort of active vocabulary words and phrases, expressions, new expressions, and use slang words. They hear them on TV.
They read them here or there, and that becomes part of their vocabulary. Um, for someone learning a foreign language, it's more difficult. So, uh, there was one paper I read, which talked about maximum 2% unknown words. So that's one in 50 unknown words, that's kind of the level you need to be at so that you can sort of naturally learn these words by guessing, or by encountering these words in different contexts and gradually getting a sense of what they mean, you know, to acquire words that way.
Uh, it would be tremendously time-consuming because as I've said, many times frequency drops off. So for the first thousand words where there are a lot of what they call function words like, uh, you know, "the", "and", uh, "by", "with", "from", "I", "you", "he": common verbs. That's all there in the first thousand. And we get those so often that we learned them.
There it is possible to acquire them through, acquire them through context in, in more or less comprehensive input. It's not, in my opinion, if you're dealing with a foreign language, if I were to start on, Finnish on LingQ, I would want to look up every word, I want to know which word is "by" or "with", or "because", and I'll forget it, but I'll look it up again.
And that way that speeds me along. Otherwise I will just be looking at the string of five words and I don't, I don't know which one is the verb, which one is "by", "with", "because", "from", "and". I look them up and eventually I remember what I looked up, not at first, but I do eventually. And, but never... in any case, the first thousand words are easier.
The second thousand words, we're now dealing with words that don't show up that often. Where you would have to, because again, theoretically, you need to meet a word eight times, according to some research in order to have a 50% chance of remembering that word. Uh, words that don't show up very often that might show up five times in a whole book.
Uh, you've got to read a lot of books in order to meet that word often enough to remember it. And particularly if you're relying on, you know, inferring or guessing the meaning of that word, if you're able to look it up, if as at LingQ you have differential, you know, uh, highlighting to remind you that you've seen the word before.
If you have, you know, lists that you can review after you finish a lesson, all of these different things can help you, you know, acquire these words more quickly so that you don't need to rely on being able to read through material that is so easy for you that there's only 2% unknown words. You actually can read material that's more difficult.
Uh, and that way by using something like LingQ, or if, even if you're reading on your Kindle and you look up words in a dictionary or whatever it might be, uh, you're able to deal with more than 2% unknown words. And every time you look the word up, you tuck it away somewhere. You forget it, but you're working your way through.
You're making that input comprehensible. You're not deliberately trying to hang on to those words. You're making the input comprehensible and in time, those words as you meet them again and again, are going to become a part of your vocabulary. So again, comprehensive or compelling input is fine, but it's something where we need an assist.
Another assist is audio. If you can hear it as well as listen to it, you get some momentum into your reading. You get sort of a combined effect, which is again, going to help you retain the vocabulary. And ultimately the goal is to acquire enough vocabulary and familiarity with the language that you can read more and more.
So it's a bit of a snowball situation. The more words you have, the more you words you can learn, the more you're enjoying the process, because as you acquire more words, you can deal with content that's of greater interest. And of course you can choose to focus your activities so that, you know, what determines... I mentioned this system in the UK, where they wanted to say, you must learn these 1700 words.
Well, if my interest is in nuclear physics, or it's in nature or it's in economics then I might actually acquire and learn and remember some very low frequency words that are relevant to my area of interest. And so we can actually control to some extent what low frequency words we're going to encounter and make sure that we encounter them over and over again.
And then every so often we can change to another call it "domain" where we again will be encountering words somewhat more frequently. We can have a strategy along those lines, uh, at, at LingQ, we like to know what percentage new words there are in any content you want to import or any, anything you may find in our library.
And typically for me, 15% unknown words is kind of a sweet spot. I know that that if I were to spend time and effort to listen to and read items with about 15% unknown words, I'm going to be really improving, increasing, you know, creating more LingQ. As we say at LingQ, adding to my vocabulary, improving my ability to understand more and more demanding material.
So, uh, the idea that sort of comprehensive input, just go out and read and enjoy yourself, I think is a little more complex than that. Uh, I think if you rely solely on being able to infer meaning, uh, without looking words up in the dictionary, without making that a little extra effort to learn the words, the amount of material that you would have to consume would be hours and hours and hours.
And on the other hand, There are so many words to learn that if you were to rely solely on say flashcard activities like Anki, then you would deny yourself the pleasure of listening and reading the whole familiarity with the language that comes through that kind of activity. So you need a bit of a mixture in my opinion.
Something between purely extensive reading or on the other hand, deliberate vocabulary study in order to make that input, you know, push you forward. And there's no question that if you can achieve a high level of comprehension, both oral and written, your speaking ability will come along. And all of that doesn't require you to be, you know, totally accurate in your use of grammar that will improve over time.
And shouldn't... testing you on grammar, which is often discouraging, shouldn't be sort of an obstacle to getting people moving forward in the language. So comprehensible input as the core, but sensible comprehensible input where modern tools are used to help people progress more quickly. That's what I think is most effective.
And, uh, I'll leave you a couple of videos that I've done on similar subjects in the past. And again, remember, please subscribe to my videos and please send along your comments. Thank you for listening.
