comprehensible input - One way only one way to acquire a language

When we understand messages. We call this comprehensible input.

We acquire language when we understand what people tell us. Not how they say it, but what they say. Or when we understand what we read.

Comprehensible input, in my opinion has been the last resort of the language teaching profession. We've tried everything else. We've tried grammar teaching, drills and exercise, computers, etc. But the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand: comprehensible input.

If comprehensible input is true, what we call the input Hypothesis is true, other things follow from it."Talking is not practicing."

It means if you want to improve your Spanish, it will not help you to speak Spanish out loud in the car, as you drive to work in the morning. It will not help you to go to the bathroom, close the door, and speak Spanish to the mirror. I used to think those things help. now I think they don't.

On the other hand, we were in a German class and we could hang together for a couple of weeks. say an hour a day of German, and I could keep the input light and lively. as in the second example.you'd start to acquire German.It would come on its own. And eventually you'd start to talk, your speaking ability would emerge gradually.

And I've decided, I've discovered. It's just about a universal experience. What has happened to me has certainly happened to you.

My experience took place in 1974, when I was briefly living in exile from California, working at the City University of New York at Queens Collage as director of English as a second language. And like everyone else in New York we lived in a big apartment building. And the apartment next door to use was owned by a Japanese company. And every year there would be a new family in the apartment.And every year there were the children who couldn't speak English.And there I was: director of English as a second language.I will teach English to these children and brag about it to my friends.

So I remember going up to the little girl next door.she was four years old. her name was Itomi. And I didn't know about this material on language acquisition. Nobody did.And I thought that the way you get people to acquire language is you get them to practice talking. So I tried to get her to talk. so I'd say: 'Itomi, talk to me!' 'Say good morning','say hi', No response.Well, clearly, I've decided , I've got to make this more concrete."Itomi, say ball", No response.Well obviously, I've got to break it down into its component parts.

Let's work on initial consonants. 'Say bah.look at my lips!'Again, no response.There was a theory going around then, that a a lot of people still believe that children don't really want to acquire language , you have to kind of force it out of them.So I tried that: I won't give you the ball until you say ball.That didn't work either. No matter what i said , Itomi wouldn't speak.She didn't say anything the first week, she didn't say anything the second week, the first month, the second month, five months until she started to speak.Actually, that's not entirely true.

1:

First it looked a lot like first language acquisition the same process our children went through.One word, two word, gradually getting more complicated.

Second, it came quickly, By the time Itomi and her family went back to Japan, at the end of the year her English was closing in on the way the other children in the neighborhood were talking.

The question is this: what was going on during those five months? She was listening. She was picking out comprehensible input. When she started to speak. It was not the beginning of her language acquisition.

When she started to speak, it was not the beginning of her language acquisition. It was the result of all the comprehensible input she had gotten over those five months.

You'd like to have a silent period. wouldn't you?

But what counts in speaking is not what you say, but what the other person says to you.In other words when you get involved in conversation, what counts is the input that you can stimulate from other people.So I'm in favor of students speaking but we have to understand it makes an indirect: a helpful, but indirect contribution to language acquisition.

Motivation; Self-esteem(higher).anxiety(lower to zero)

The amount of drive or anxiety necessary to accomplish a task depends on the task. Sometimes what we call facilitative anxiety is okay.I don't believe in torture,but sometimes a little anxiety is okay.Language acquisition though, is different.

For language acquisition succeed anxiety has to be directed somewhere else, not at the language. The child has to assume that she's going to be successful.

If the student isn't motivated, if self-esteem is low, if anxiety is high , if the student is on the defensive, if the student thinks the language class is a place where his weaknesses will be revealed. he may understand the input, but it won't penetrate. It won't reach those parts of the brain that do language acquisition. A block keeps it out. We call this block the affective filter.

LAD:

Here's how it works , somewher in the brain Chomsky tells us, is a Language Acquisition Device(LAD). Our job is to get input into the device.

Low motivation, low self-esteem. high anxiety: the block goes up. the filter goes up. the input can not get in.both getting comprehensible input, one makes progress, the other doesn't. One is open to the input, the other is closed.

Let me now try to summarize everything I've said in the last 10-15 minutes or so. And I'll summarize it in one sentence. And we'll wounder why it took me that long. We acquire language in one way and only one way. When we get comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment.