krashen comprehension hypothesis

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• > Journals
• > Journal of Classics Teaching
• > Volume 20 Issue 39
• > Comprehensible Input and Krashen's theory

Article contents

Ci and the latin classroom: the last two decades, krashen's principles of comprehensible input, the acquisition-learning distinction principle, the natural order principle, the monitor principle, the input principle, the affective filter principle, the compelling input principle, comprehensible input and krashen's theory.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2019

Over the last 20 years in the United States a curious and likely unpredictable movement has been evolving in the way that we teach Latin and ancient Greek. A set of pedagogical principles known as Comprehensible Input (hereafter CI) has become a vehicle of change affecting our classrooms, our professional organisations and our teacher training programs as well as our relationships with and our positions in world language organisations. These changes to the teaching of classical languages were unpredictable because at the outset CI represented a set of hypotheses and then principles that even their progenitor, Stephen Krashen, thought of as the way into acquiring modern languages while teachers of classical languages had constructed a fortified wall around themselves built on the notion that Latin and ancient Greek were uniquely different from modern languages and, therefore, required different approaches. In many iterations of this wall, only a select cadre of students was thought (and easily demonstrated to be) capable of or even interested in mastering classical languages. This article will examine very briefly what this wave of change has been like in the Latin classrooms and institutions of the US and examine in particular the principles of Comprehensible Input: what they propose, how they are being practised in Latin classrooms, and the obstacles they encounter as well as opportunities they afford Latin programs which intend to survive and thrive in the coming years.

20 years ago, as a relatively new teacher of Latin I had a series of experiences that I can now identify as the beginning of my encounter with Comprehensible Input. I was teaching by day and going back to University by night to work on a degree in Spanish. Lady Fortune saw to it that I landed in a class of intermediate Spanish taught by a professor from India who had studied all of his Spanish in Spain. He was multilingual and, as I came to understand, spent a great deal of time reflecting on how he would deliver language learning to his students. After my first class with him, he never spoke another word of English to us (which by itself is not necessarily a good teaching plan). At the same time, he ensured that no one in the room was lost for lack of understanding. He spoke to us entirely in Spanish in ways that we always understood. Every session included new vocabulary which he always helped us understand even while we were using them. I would leave those classes, and, on the trip home, discover that I continued to hold internal dialogues in my mind in Spanish. I will never forget the night that this nagging, relentless question arose in my consciousness: why can I not teach Latin this way?

The answer to that question is a long one which I will not belabour here except through summary. I could not teach Latin that way because through all of my own studies and preparations, I was not prepared to speak a word of Latin. I was not prepared to actually read Latin. I had never had the experience of thinking in Latin. I never wrote a single personally communicative sentence in Latin. I was not ever given the chance to try and understand Latin spoken to me for the purpose of communication. I had, through relentless self-imposed determination, mastered the ability to talk at length about the different uses of the ablative case, of compound verbs that require the dative, of verbs of remembering and forgetting that require the genitive, of the difference in primary and secondary sequence. I could tell you what a Ciceronian period was and how utterly overwhelming they could be to try to translate. And yes, translation: it would be a few years before I came to realise that translating Latin or Greek was not at all the same thing as reading those languages which could actually be done, left to right, word for word. Reading these languages as they were written and understanding them as such also creates deeper meaning and understanding in the reader who is then drawn into the text. Translating or decoding classical languages is rather like demanding that the meaning of the text come out and become something foreign to itself - the reader's native language.

About this same time, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) published its first edition of the Standards for World Languages. In the course of attempting to embrace what ACTFL was offering to us via the four modes of language (listening, reading, speaking and writing), I came across reference to Krashen's work. It would still be another five years before I actually picked up his work and began to try to employ it in my teaching. Meanwhile, I was determined to teach Latin like my Spanish professor was teaching me Spanish. I decided that the problem was that I couldn't speak Latin, so I attempted to focus on that. I created classroom scripts for myself which I painstakingly created using the Latin I knew and what was at the time the first edition of Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency (Traupman, Reference Traupman 1997 ). The day came when I was ready (with the help of cue cards hidden from student sight all over the room) to speak to my students in Latin of all the classroom management things that we did every day. That's when I encountered what should have been the obvious obstacle: I had prepared myself to speak Latin to them, but I had no idea how to prepare them to understand what I was trying to say. Needless to say, those first attempts were anxiety-provoking in all of us, exhausting and sent me back to ponder. Perhaps Latin was just too different. Perhaps Spanish was just so much easier that it could be taught in a way that immediately communicated. Perhaps I was wasting my time. Those thoughts tortured me because at the same time I found competing thoughts. Latin is a human language. It has an incredibly long history of communicating what all of my own teachers and much of my society claim are important, valuable perhaps even eternal messages for us to understand. If that's so, how can I begin to teach Latin as a language that communicates?

The truth that confronted me each day was that all I was prepared to teach my students was the equivalent of the art of autopsy. That required a dead language and students with the fortitude to cut open the corpse each day. Too many of them were not willing to do that, and they were failing. At this rate, my program would itself die in a few years. That has been true all across our educational landscape. Too many Latin students were not capable of or interested in linguistic autopsy of a dead language. They either went elsewhere for language study, or failed out of our programs before our programs were closed.

In the early 2000's with all of these competing questions stirring in me, a confluence of things moved me on in this quest for Latin as a language that communicates important messages. Despite my first horrible attempts to use Latin in my classroom, I persisted in the idea that I should be able to do that. I also came across the works of James Asher with Total Physical Response ( Reference Asher 1988 ), the hypotheses of Stephen Krashen, the natural method used by Hans Oerburg, and the so called ‘green bible’ of Ray and Seely. By reading their works I was using total physical response to introduce new vocabulary, convincing administrators to purchase Oerburg's Lingua Latina as our textbook (which had no English in it at all), attempting to tell and ask stories and circle words and phrases in my classroom just by trial and error (with no one to ask or model after in Latin). I had read the five hypotheses of Krashen. They made sense on paper, but it would still be several years before they began to be the framework for practices in my classroom. In early 2004, I had the opportunity to attend a one-day lecture with Stephen Krashen in Atlanta followed by a two-day workshop the next year with Jason Fritze in the use of TPRS. In those two live and interactive events, I found much affirmation for what I had been trying, some correctives for what I had misunderstood and the encouragement (at least from modern language colleagues) to persist.

Trying to talk about these things with Latin colleagues was another kind of experience altogether. These were still the days of email listservs. They were a huge advantage to professional collaboration over waiting for annual conferences to arrive for a few days of face to face conversation (often dominated by the reading of papers and no real conversation or collaborative reflection on best practices). The email listserv, however, left awful gaps in the ability to communicate. I boldly brought what I was thinking, doing and trying to the Latin community of teachers there, and it was largely not welcome. I argued the theories as best I could. When asked for examples, I would gladly offer up a recent set of materials and experiences from my classroom. When a mistake was found in my Latin (regardless of whether it was a typo or an actual gap in my knowledge) I was dismissed along with the new theories as someone who simply did not know his Latin. If one did not know the basics of Latin grammar, the usual dismissal went, why should we listen to these theories that are meant for modern languages? Besides, Latin is different, and these things won't work in Latin. I lost count of the times that I was told that nothing I had to offer was worth the conversation because my Latin was bad. I came to understand that accusing another colleague of bad Latin was the quickest and commonest defence against new ideas in our community. Despite this experience of shouting against the traditional winds, two of us decided to create a new listserv. John Piazza (current Latin teacher at Berkley High School) and I formed the Latin Best Practices listserv (now found on Facebook) and quickly established it as a place to discuss ‘those second language acquisition practices that help all kinds of students make progress in Latin and which continue to evolve into better practices as they are shared’.

A little over ten years ago in 2008 two colleagues (Rachel Ash and Stephanie Molchen) and I offered what would be the first (and at the time we were sure the last) session at the Institute of the American Classical League introducing Comprehensible Input. To an overflow crowd of about 100 Latin teachers, we offered a reading from Ovid's Metamorphoses - the description of Envy: Met. II.760-782, 790-796. We asked participants to read it to themselves, saying that they had two minutes in which to do so. We then asked them to turn to a partner and describe what they had just read. That discussion did not last long and the level of conversation was very quiet. Over the course of the next hour, the three of us used a variety of CI strategies to deliver what we felt were the unknown vocabulary of this less read text, and we did it completely in Latin. At the end of the hour, we asked participants to read the text again. Within minutes the room was buzzing with conversation and excitement. There were even a few audible gasps. Latin teachers were actually able to read and understand a passage that an hour before many had difficulty with. We had wanted them to experience this approach as much like students as possible, and it seemed they did. What was the first thing that someone said to us afterwards? It consisted of a criticism of some of our pronunciation of a Latin word or two (your stress was off in that word). The overwhelming conversation for the next two days, though, consisted of individuals confessing to us how little of the text they had first been able to read, and how much more they understood after the CI framed activities.

Ten years later, Comprehensible Input is a reality that everyone is contending with. Scores of Latin teachers have fully embraced it. Many more are taking their first steps with it. Thousands are participating in conversations on the internet about it, collaborating and sharing ideas as well as being willing to ask questions about it. Even those who reject it now know that they must include it in their conversations, planning and structures when language pedagogy is part of the conversation. Sessions offered at the American Classical League's annual Summer Institute now routinely include many which are devoted to CI-related topics, and this is true at regional and state level classics professional meetings as well. Conferences that used to be dismissed by Latin teachers as for modern languages only now enjoy a healthy contingent of Latin teachers who are present for and offering workshops on their use of second language acquisition principles which stem from or are in dialogue with Comprehensible Input. Younger teachers who are joining the field either have come from programs that have included CI in their array of second language acquisition studies, or they have heard from their in-field colleagues that CI is something they must know about. That has created a new reality in which novice as well as veteran classical language teachers have in common a new willingness to learn how to teach Latin and Greek differently from how they themselves learned.

Before I turn to the principles of CI, I want to bring my own story up to the present. 14 years ago, I took the position that I now hold in a large (3000+ students) metropolitan high school. The program was staffed by one Latin teacher whom I replaced. There were 130 students in the program offering four years of Latin. Despite the school's multicultural demographics, the Latin program was made up entirely of white and Asian students. By that time, I was fully committed to CI as the framework for how I taught Latin. As I write this in late 2018, our program has grown to 700 students and five full-time Latin teachers. We have a high retention rate from year one to year four (40-60% depending on the year compared to a more traditional 1-10%), and a virtual zero failure rate. Our program now matches the school in every demographic including students who are being served by Special Education for various learning difficulties. Recent enrolment numbers show that our Special Education numbers have almost doubled in the last two years including 121 currently among our total enrolment in Latin. The five of us who teach in the Latin program are clear that we would never go back to anything we have done prior to discovering the principles of Comprehensible Input.

In what follows, I offer what I now understand to be the principles of Comprehensible Input that can be a complete philosophical framing of pedagogical practices. Those are important distinctions. The principles provide an intellectual framework for the various (dozens) of practices which we are creating, using, sharing and evolving in our classrooms. What I am calling the principles of CI began as Krashen's five hypotheses. Some time later, he offered a sixth. As I have heard Krashen himself say on numerous occasions, the difference in a hypothesis and a theory is not worth pressing. Both a hypothesis and a theory require evidence that supports their claims, and there is plenty of support to establish the claims of his hypotheses. On the other hand, if you wish to disagree with CI and have what you believe is one instance of non-supporting evidence, there is no amount of evidence that will convince you otherwise. My own experience and that of scores of Latin teachers who have embraced CI is that not only are the principles of CI intellectually appealing and supported by research and studies, but we find that by engaging in pedagogical practices that reflect them, we see significantly positive results in our classrooms. Latin becomes accessible to all kinds of learners, and while failure rates plummet retention rates soar. Below, I will briefly explain each of the principles, i.e. how I explain them in workshops and graduate courses to teachers and teachers in training. I will give reference to Krashen's work and strongly urge those interested in CI to read his own words (all on his website for free access at www.sdkrashen.com ). I will then offer an example of what that may look like in a Latin classroom (remember, there are dozens of practices developed and being developed) as well as potential opportunities and obstacles that one may encounter.

As a Latin teacher, this first principle played more games with my own thinking about our language than perhaps any of the others. Ultimately, I realised that I had spent so many years ‘learning’ Latin while ‘acquiring’ very little of it. So, what is this distinction that Krashen draws ( Reference Krashen 1982 , pp 10-11)? We must note up front that very often, especially among language teachers, learning language and acquiring language are used almost synonymously, and learning a language is most often spoken of among educators as if it were the same as learning mathematics. This first principle begins a very different framing for us around what we do as teachers of language, even the Latin language. The acquisition of language is unconscious, implicit, picked up from meaningful, interesting messages in the target language. Acquiring language in these ways advances the student's ability in the language. Language learning is a consciously undertaken activity. Learning involves explicit knowledge about the way language works. This kind of knowledge is useful, but only when it comes to editing language that one is already capable of producing. Acquiring language and learning about the nuts and bolts (grammar and syntax) of the language are ultimately both important, but they are not the same and they are not interchangeable. Acquisition moves the student from novice to intermediate to advanced and above in the various proficiencies of listening, reading, speaking and writing a language, but explicit learning of the grammar of a language is only useful after the student can produce the language. Traditional forms of teaching second languages, in particularly our own classical languages of Latin and Ancient Greek, have focused on learning with very little, perhaps even accidental occasions of acquisition.

Traditional Latin classrooms and all textbooks that I know of follow a grammar syllabus thereby establishing the learning approach over acquisition. We begin chapter 1 in a textbook with a look at first declension nouns or first conjugation verbs or both because, well, they are first in the syllabus. This presumes that all students know what a noun and a verb are, what declension and conjugation mean, and various other parts of speech. We relentlessly decry how many students ‘do not know their grammar in English’ so how are we expected to teach it to them in Latin. The simple fact is that they already speak, read, write and understand English without knowing their grammar. How might an acquisition approach look on day one? The Latin teacher has written these words with their English equivalents on the board: sella, surge, i, ad, conside. The teacher pronounces each Latin word and what it means in English. The teacher points to the class, and then to surge. The teacher says: discipuli, surgite (and gestures for them to rise). They do, of course. Then, the teacher says: discipuli, considite (and gestures for them to sit - which they do). The teacher then calls on one after another student, points to the appropriate words and slowly tells the student: surge. i ad sellam. conside. surge. i ad sellam tuam. conside.

Latin teachers will notice that I have not called for explaining the imperative, or the differences in singular and plural commands, or that I have used the accusative case as object of the preposition while only listing it on the board in the nominative. I have used none of those words with students. What this example models is communicating to students with understandable messages in Latin. In short order of time (within the same class period) the teacher can add other nouns and verbs in whatever declension and conjugations desired so that by the end of the period students - all students - will have an initial acquisition of many new words that means something to them in Latin, words like: sella, surge, i, ad, conside, sume, fer, animal, canis, feles, ursa, da, sacculus, quis, vult, habere, graphidum, calamus, charta, liber, et al. Offered as understandable messages in Latin, these words will not be forgotten. They are not memorised. They are not learned. They are acquired. We find in our own practices that beginning a new semester or school year with extensive reviews is simply not necessary. Students will not forget what they have acquired.

The opportunities afforded by focus on acquisition are many. The example above demonstrates several. We can focus on the immediate environment, as we and students create it, and make that environment and what we do in it the immediate context for learning. Why should students have to wait until the chapter on second declension to talk about books, friends, pencils and pens, or until the chapter on the third declension to talk about mother, father, brothers and sisters? With an acquisition focus, who students are and where they gather for study can become one with the language they are learning. Acquisition like this focuses first on listening. I found early and repeated surprising results from this. Students’ accuracy in pronunciation and spelling of Latin increased rapidly - far more rapidly than when I explicitly taught them the rules for pronunciation and despite repeated remarks about the phonetic quality of Latin (no silent letters, no ambiguous sounds, etc.). Teaching for acquisition moves the experience of learning from facing into a page to a face-to-face experience–which is the most basic form of human communication.

There will be potential obstacles for a Latin teacher who shifts from a learning to an acquisition focus. It presumes on the front end that Latin teachers are prepared to speak Latin in a meaningful way with students. For many, this is not true even in the most rudimentary level. I once had a conversation with a veteran Latin teacher who, upon hearing me present on CI-based Latin instruction, said that while he could teach students about the imperative mood with ease, he had no idea what to do with them communicatively. Latin teachers will need support to fill in their own lack of the acquisition of the language (that's another article). Many will immediately ask: when will they learn their grammar? While that is also another article (which is addressed in this series) I can offer one comment. As students acquire the language, they will ask questions about things they notice. These noticed things will be the grammar that we would otherwise be teaching them though not with the symmetry or ease of explicit teaching. When they want to know why we said sellam instead of sella , we can within seconds explain that when the word is the object of an action or movement, we add an m to make that clear. Latin works like that. Period. That will satisfy. It will be the kind of explanation that they are both ready for and for which they really need no prior knowledge. Down the road, after they are capable of producing the language to some degree, we may offer them periods of explicit grammar instruction - simply for them to use while editing their own work. After all, that's what grammars are for.

The principle of the Natural Order (Krashen, Reference Krashen 1982 , pp. 12-14) functions like an operating system on a computer - always there and running in the background, perhaps gathering data for later use, but never quite obvious to the user. As a hypothesis it states that there is an order in which people acquire a language. The order is different for different languages, but we don't know what that order is for most languages. Even if we did know, creating a syllabus based on the natural order would be ineffective because then we would be tempted to teach for learning rather than acquisition. The important thing for the teacher to understand from this principle (and keep running in the background of what we do) is that a student will not acquire a feature of the language until he/she is ready. In the meantime, the teacher's focus must be on giving students more understandable input. Because research has not been done on most languages to determine the natural order of acquisition, we as teachers are simply invited to observe. My own observation over the years is that students in Latin seem to be slower to acquire noun endings than they do verb endings. Despite the fact that I as a student was forced to memorise noun endings immediately and up front, they seem to be very slowly acquired for output in Latin. The good news is that despite that slow uptake, noun endings do not seem to hinder listening and reading comprehension. Since our job is to continuously give them understandable input (listening and reading) they will be continuously exposed to all of those noun endings. It should be no surprise, then, that the ones they seem to acquire first are nominatives and accusatives - since they appear much more frequently in texts.

The opportunities for classroom practices framed by this principle are simple and already stated above. On a daily basis, the teacher must ask: what understandable input will I speak and/or place in front of my students to read? If our input is understandable in Latin (without the need for tedious translation) students will make progress, and the natural order of the language will unfold in their experience. The obstacle to embracing this principle is also simple and really already addressed: can we who were trained with a grammar syllabus trust that there is a natural order to how Latin is acquired and that the focus on acquisition really works? We might do well, when given the opportunity, to inquire of friends and colleagues whose first languages are highly inflected (Russian, Slavic, Polish, Greek, et al) about their memories of getting all those noun endings right. At first, they may dismiss the question because, of course, they acquired these things first and only learned them grammatically later. What do they remember their parents doing and saying when they were very small that they recall later being about getting those endings right? This may console us that languages as inflected as Latin can be acquired and that there is an order to it which we can trust.

The Monitor Principle indicates how the CI approach to teaching languages is well rooted in cognitive psychology as it turns our attention to the internal self-consciousness that we all have about the use of language. Krashen calls this internal self-consciousness the monitor ( Reference Krashen 1982 , pp.15-19). Self-consciousness is a tricky aspect of human personality perhaps best described as a sort of blessing-curse. In any endeavour, the right amount of self-consciousness can help us improve skill sets, notice our ways of relating to others around us, protect ourselves and take advantage of good opportunities. At the same time, too much self-consciousness begins to interfere with all of those things. Skills that truly do belong to us suffer with rising self-consciousness (ask any athlete or musician how that works). Relationships become awkward, and dangers and opportunities can be misread with too much self-consciousness. Self-consciousness in great amounts can become entirely paralysing. So, too, when the self-consciousness is about the language we are using or trying to use especially when that language is new to us.

In the Latin classroom, working with the Monitor Principle as framework to our teaching means a greater use of scaffolding activities so that individual students feel supported and rarely if ever isolated or made the centre of attention (which is different if they volunteer to be the centre of attention). Once again, we see the first principle – acquisition - as the driver of how this principle works. If we are routinely delivering understandable messages in Latin (by speaking and offering readings) the students’ internal self-consciousness will keep a low profile. When it is invoked, it will work with some confidence. In addition to scaffolding, teachers can learn to be the sympathetic listener and reader of student-produced Latin. When the student says: Fredericus est amicum et nos placet ire ad ludus , the teacher understands and says back: Ah, Fredericus est amicus? vobis placet ire ad ludum? By being the sympathetic listener and reader of student output, teachers keep the self-consciousness of the monitor in low profile while at the same time offering repetitions of good Latin.

The opportunities and obstacles of working with the Monitor Principle are the same. As teachers who know the explicit grammar of the language extremely well, we are inclined to correct student mistakes, both in the moment and on paper. The hours that teachers spend writing corrections on student papers is beyond the imagination of most people except for the teachers who do it, and those hours are wasted. Repeated research (Truscott, Reference Truscott 2007 ) indicates that the written correction of students’ writing in second language has the opposite effect to the teacher's intent. Rather than make progress in the language, the error corrections cause students to retreat in their writing ability to less advanced stages in an attempt to avoid errors. This is the self-consciousness of the monitor working as an obstacle. A teacher who acts as sympathetic listener and reader, who models back good Latin will help cultivate a healthy monitor in students. Then, when students are capable of producing the language (likely in intermediate levels of work) they may offer short periods of explicit grammar instruction for the use of editing their own work.

At first glance, our modern language colleagues struggle with this principle more than we classical language teachers. They want their students to begin speaking their languages immediately, and they have traditionally done this by forcing output through scripted dialogues and ‘total immersion’ classrooms where the teacher refuses to speak any of L1 thereby forcing students into L2. These methods simply don't work and frighten many students away (or fail them away) thinking that they don't have second language capacity. CI principles recognise that speaking languages is hardwired into the human brain. There is no question that each student has the capacity for acquiring a second language. The question is how to facilitate that acquisition.

Latin and ancient Greek teachers struggle with this principle, too. While we have traditionally not even expected our students to speak our languages, we have expected them to interact with the grammar and syntax of the language from day one so that they could begin translating them into their native languages. Under the cover of translation, we, too, have rushed to some sort of output. The motivation is likely the same. We want output from our students in some form as evidence that they are learning.

The Input Principle (Krashen, Reference Krashen 1982 , pp. 20-29) maintains that acquisition happens when learners receive understandable messages in the target language, that is, understandable input. There are two forms of language input: listening and reading. The research behind this principle indicates that both forms of input are necessary for acquisition, but ultimately reading is slightly more effective. We know that human beings are capable of acquiring human language even with impediments to sight and sound, but even so, sight and sound are the regular vehicles through which human beings acquire language. Ultimately, this principle of Input holds that if we want students to engage in L2 output (speaking and writing) it will be as a direct result of the understandable input they receive–and that must be huge amounts of input. Every day with the Latin teacher, then, Latin students will need to hear from their teacher a lot of Latin that they can understand. They will require Latin to read that they can understand without having to translate it into English (translation and reading are not the same thing and constitute separate skills).

This is where the obstacles arise for the Latin teacher. Immediately, from our traditional training, we wonder aloud why bother with all this speaking Latin when we do not ever expect our students to speak or write in Latin. We want them to read Latin so that they can access the great texts of the literary tradition. It is precisely there that opportunity meets obstacle. If we wish students to acquire Latin so that they can actually read it, they will need loads of understandable input through sound and sight. We have omitted these processes in the past and moved ahead to grammar rules and translation. We have asked students to translate into English things that they cannot read. It becomes a kind of linguistic algebra, solving for X with an outcome that almost always becomes: translation into English words things that make no sense to the student at all - and that is for those who persist. We simply either exclude many others from the beginning, or they fail out of our programs. We must focus on the promise here. When we offer our students routinely and consistently Latin that they can understand through listening and reading, they will - all kinds of learners - acquire a growing ability to understand Latin texts. If reading and understanding the literature of the Latin tradition is our goal, we must deliver understandable input to our students through listening and reading. That raises other challenges that will also be the focus of articles in this series: building backwards from texts that are too difficult for our students and offering them in understandable bites appropriate for their proficiency level.

While this principle comes towards the end of the list of CI principles, I have come to see it as the sine qua non of this framework, meaning this. Even if we had all of the other principles in place and adhered to perfectly, the absence of attention to the affective filter at work in all of our students would constitute a missing bridge between the island of student learning and the teacher's mainland. The human affective filter is made up of various human emotional qualities including spectra within the human of motivation and lethargy, self-esteem and self-doubt, confidence and anxiety, calm and stress. As we can easily imagine, the affective filter is deeply shaped by an individual's upbringing as well as inherent traits. In other words, nurture and nature are at play in what constitutes the affective filter. The Affective Filter Principle (Krashen, Reference Krashen 1982 pp. 30-31) acknowledges that each student walks into our classrooms with this whole array of feeling-state possibilities. There will always be circumstances at work outside or our purview which have set those feelings into motion before they ever see us. We are not responsible for that. The Affective Filter Principle, however, acknowledges that those feelings and emotional patterns help and hinder language acquisition. Succinctly put, it observes that when the affective filter rises (i.e. levels of anxiety rise), acquisition of the second language diminishes. Whether the L2 teacher wishes to deal with student feelings and emotions or not, the reality is that whatever is going on with their emotional states has a direct effect on the language we are trying to help them acquire in L2. This is where the Affective Filter Principle ties back into the first - Acquisition vs Learning Principle and the Input Principle. We know that input activities and communicative tasks that focus on acquisition tend to lower stress; those other things that we might do which focus on learning (explicit instruction) tend to increase stress and anxiety.

With this most essential principle of CI, I am afraid that the opportunities and obstacles will be at immediate odds within the teacher. The opportunities should become obvious: when we plan our lessons, they should focus on lots of understandable input, stories and communicative tasks in which students forget that we are working in Latin and become lost in the ‘flow’ of the language even in its simplest forms. When students remark how quickly the class time passed, we know that this has happened. At the same time, however, creating and facilitating these kinds of lessons can become for the teacher - especially one new to CI - rather exhausting. The exhausted teacher (of any languages) will resort to what is known and familiar to him/her. In other words, the teacher has an affective filter, too. As stress rises for the teacher who is producing understandable input for the student, the teacher will be more inclined to give a grammar lecture, a culture discussion, reading or worksheet in English, or give students grammar and translation assignments that they can do ‘quietly at their desks’ so that the teacher can recover. These are the realities. Those of us using CI in the field now for more than a few years know that, over time, Latin teachers become more capable of offering acquisition-accessible lessons for their students with less tendency to exhaust themselves. Other writers in this series will demonstrate and discuss the rhythms and flow of CI-based lessons that help the teacher navigate the ground between what nurtures the students’ affective filters without spoiling their own.

In an essay subsequent to his book, Krashen acknowledges a sixth hypothesis which he calls the compelling input hypothesis ( Reference Krashen 2013 ). Simply put, he proposes based on evidence that acquisition of L2 is more successful when the input (reading and listening) is made up of material that the learner finds compelling. We can see the immediate connection to the Affective Filter Principle. This Compelling Principle implies the importance of learner's choice, and choice may be one way of lowering the affective filter and inviting students into the understandable input that we have planned for them - if our planning has taken into consideration student choices about material content. There is also, then, an implicit requirement that compelling material only works if it is also comprehensible. When teachers are willing to bring understandable messages to their students that are also compelling to their students, they are already acknowledging the communicative nature of teaching and learning especially in an L2 classroom. To offer input that is both understandable and compelling, we must know something about our students in each particular class every term that we teach. Who they are, what drives them, their creative abilities, fears, dreams and aspirations - all aspects of the make-up of the affective filter - tell us something of who they are and what kinds of material they will lean into both emotionally and physically when I put it before them. In a recent class of fourth year Latin students, a class that happened to be all girls in their last year of high school, I placed a list of 1000 fables from the Latin literary tradition divided by categories before them and asked them identify their favorite categories. They chose the categories of bears, wolves, goddesses and women. We did not have time to read 1000 fables, and even if we had, they would not have found them all compelling. The fact that they were the determiners of what we would read added an immediate aspect of the compelling to our work. I am certain that a different class in a different year would have chosen different categories.

Latin teachers traditionally trained will be most inclined to allow some set of external determiners establish their material content. For example, the notion that Caesar must be read in the second year and that Virgil's Aeneid must be conquered by the end of the curriculum are old notions that are rarely challenged. To put the challenge to that notion before us quickly: if one intends on teaching only male students with a proclivity for war who have been pre-selected by their high-achieving and well-demonstrated willingness to persevere under all constraints and only those kinds of students, then proceed to Caesar and Virgil. The Latin program will remain small, elite and inaccessible to most students - that is if it continues to be supported by schools and systems who find small elite programs impractical. The fact is that both Caesar and Virgil write at a level that is well beyond what students in high school and even university programs are capable of reading and understanding. Caesar and Virgil as required texts, if we are honest, reflect a time when only white, affluent, overtly scholarly male students were the intended audience. They became the norm for what teaching and learning Latin meant, and those programs are either gone from our academic landscape or they are in the final hours of death.

The Compelling Principle offers real opportunity, however. The literary tradition of the Latin language is much larger than the tiny period of the classical golden age, and its content far broader than war and epic. Latin writers treat religion and love, philosophy and history, fables and magic, war and art, epic and lyric, comedy and tragedy, prose and verse, scientific speculation and mathematical inquiry. Most of that literature is far too advanced for the students in our classrooms (and if we are honest, for us as well). However, we who teach Latin do have the capacity to take on any of these areas, explore and adapt them for our students at a level that they are able to understand. Several years ago, I took one line from Quintilian's Institutiones (I.3.12) about children learning their mores inter ludendum. I offered vocabulary to my students that would be required for discussions about the games (both table and athletic) they liked to play, how they were played, and why they liked to play them. We discussed, in Latin, various qualitates as mores that might be gained or confronted in playing games–like virtus, auctoritas, severitas, gravitas, comitas, veritas, honestas et al (mostly taken from Cicero). In Latin we defined these terms and talked about how they might be encountered in particular games. I taught them to play the Roman ball game Trigon, and again, we discussed which mores/qualities might be at play in that game for players and spectators. They wrote about this game, their experience, and how it compared and contrasted with their favourite American games - in Latin. We did the same with Tali, gambling and playing games at Saturnalia. Not a single student complained about all the time we spent on games, game-playing and discussions about moral qualities and how they reveal themselves in game-playing. They did not read large portions of Quintilian, Cicero or Macrobius, but the works of each of these found their way into our experiences of acquiring Latin because students found this content that I created out of the classical literature compelling.

I close with some final commentary on the opportunities and obstacles that the principles of CI bring if they are engaged as the pedagogical framework in a Latin or Ancient Greek program. A university professor once remarked to me that if they were to embrace this approach, they would have to change everything. With that, she dismissed any more conversation about Comprehensible Input. In some respects, she is right. Teachers and professors who have their set authors, their traditional texts, and an established way of conducting classes would feel like they were indeed changing everything if they were to embrace CI principles for their program. Underneath those fixed externals which often are also attached to research and writing projects for the university professor is the unspoken reality: most of us were never allowed opportunities to acquire these languages as modes of communication. I speculate that the majority of Latinists have never spoken Latin or if they did it was in a short and fun sort of temporary experience, certainly nothing they or others expected them to do in a classroom. The vast majority do not routinely write in Latin even though they likely are masters of the Latin grammar and may even teach advanced courses in Latin grammar and syntax. As the earlier mentioned teacher articulated, there is no significant connection between grammar study and writing ability in a language (Krashen, Reference Krashen 1988 ). The necessity of becoming acquainted with this term's students, creating spoken and reading materials for them that they find compelling does upend the cart of what teachers and professors call their curriculum, and yet the very word curriculum implores movement, swift movement and change, does it not?

The opportunities that CI principles afford are nothing short of reintroducing humanity and the realities of human experience back into the classical languages that are the core of the humanities. Rather than force this term's students through the traditional corpus of Latin and Greek content, teachers and professors framing their programs with CI principles actually begin to set up communication, dialogue, between the ancient corpus of literature and the living, breathing students before them. Teachers of the classics have the opportunity of knowing not only a Virgil, Cicero or Aesop, a Camilla, Lucretia or Lesbia. They have the opportunity of becoming acquainted with Rodney, Rahul and Malik, Rachondra, Monica and Haley. More to the point, they have the opportunity to help these living breathing students in front of them begin to listen to and speak back to our classical progenitors in their own, modern Latin words and thoughts. If we rise to those opportunities in the face of the obstacles we encounter, those students will not forget their Latin. That is the last observation I will make. Language that is acquired is not forgotten. Language that is learned, is.

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• Volume 20, Issue 39
• Robert Patrick
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S2058631019000060

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Dr. Stephen Krashen answers questions on The Comprehension Hypothesis Extended

Stephen Krashen is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. He is best known for developing the first comprehensive theory of second language acquisition, introducing the concept of sheltered subject matter teaching, and as the co-inventor of the Natural Approach to foreign language teaching. He has also contributed to theory and application in the area of bilingual education, and has done important work in the area of reading. He was the 1977 Incline Bench Press champion of Venice Beach and holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He is the author of The Power of Reading (2004) and Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use (2003). His recent papers can be found at < www.sdkrashen.com> .

JALT’s Extensive Reading SIG brought Dr. Stephen D. Krashen to the Fifth Annual Extensive Reading in Japan Seminar, and on July 3rd, he spoke to approximately 150 people at Kobe’s International House. Kobe JALT’s Membership Chair prepared a form for participants to write down questions for Dr. Krashen. The following questions received responses and have been modified for brevity and accuracy.

Introduction The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis The Natural Order Hypothesis The Monitor Hypothesis The Input Hypothesis The Affective Filter Hypothesis Curriculum Design Conclusions Bibliography

  Introduction         The influence of Stephen Krashen on language education research and practice is undeniable.  First introduced over 20 years ago, his theories are still debated today.  In 1983, he published The Natural Approach with Tracy Terrell, which combined a comprehensive second language acquisition theory with a curriculum for language classrooms.  The influence of Natural Approach can be seen especially in current EFL textbooks and teachers resource books such as The Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993).  Krashen’s theories on second language acquisition have also had a huge impact on education in the state of California, starting in 1981 with his contribution to Schooling and language minority students: A theoretical framework by the California State Department of Education (Krashen 1981).  Today his influence can be seen most prominently in the debate about bilingual education and perhaps less explicitly in language education policy:  The BCLAD/CLAD teacher assessment tests define the pedagogical factors affecting first and second language development in exactly the same terms used in Krashen’s Monitor Model (California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 1998).         As advertised, The Natural Approach is very appealing – who wouldn’t want to learn a language the natural way, and what language teacher doesn’t think about what kind of input to provide for students.  However, upon closer examination of Krashen’s hypotheses and Terrell’s methods, they fail to provide the goods for a workable system.  In fact, within the covers of “The Natural Approach”, the weaknesses that other authors criticize can be seen playing themselves out into proof of the failure of Krashen’s model.  In addition to reviewing what other authors have written about Krashen’s hypotheses, I will attempt to directly address what I consider to be some of the implications for ES/FL teaching today by drawing on my own experience in the classroom as a teacher and a student of language.  Rather than use Krashen’s own label, which is to call his ideas simply “second language acquisition theory”, I will adopt McLaughlin’s terminology (1987) and refer to them collectively as “the Monitor Model”.  This is distinct from “the Monitor Hypothesis”, which is the fourth of Krashen’s five hypotheses. The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis         First is the Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis, which makes a distinction between “acquisition,” which he defines as developing competence by using language for “real communication” and “learning.” which he defines as “knowing about” or “formal knowledge” of a language (p.26).  This hypothesis is presented largely as common sense: Krashen only draws on only one set of references from Roger Brown in the early 1970’s.  He claims that Brown’s research on first language acquisition showed that parents tend to correct the content of children’s speech rather than their grammar.  He compares it with several other authors’ distinction of “implicit” and “explicit” learning but simply informs the reader that evidence will be presented later.         Gregg (1984) first notes that Krashen’s use of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) gives it a much wider scope of operation than even Chomsky himself.  He intended it simply as a construct to describe the child’s initial state, which would therefore mean that it cannot apply to adult learners.  Drawing on his own experience of learning Japanese, Gregg contends that Krashen’s dogmatic insistence that “learning” can never become “acquisition” is quickly refuted by the experience of anyone who has internalized some of the grammar they have consciously memorized.  However, although it is not explicitly stated, Krashen’s emphasis seems to be that classroom learning does not lead to fluent, native-like speech.  Gregg’s account that his memorization of a verb conjugation chart was “error-free after a couple of days”(p.81) seems to go against this spirit.  The reader is left to speculate whether his proficiency in Japanese at the time was sufficient enough for him to engage in error-free conversations with the verbs from his chart.         McLaughlin (1987) begins his critique by pointing out that Krashen never adequately defines “acquisition”, “learning”, “conscious” and “subconscious”, and that without such clarification, it is very difficult to independently determine whether subjects are “learning” or “acquiring” language.  This is perhaps the first area that needs to be explained in attempting to utilize the Natural Approach.  If the classroom situation is hopeless for attaining proficiency, then it is probably best not to start.  As we will see in an analysis of the specific methods in the book, any attempt to recreate an environment suitable for “acquisition” is bound to be problematic.         Krashen’s conscious/unconscious learning distinction appeals to students and teachers in monolingual countries immediately.  In societies where there are few bilinguals, like the United States, many people have struggled to learn a foreign language at school, often unsuccessfully.  They see people who live in other countries as just having “picked up” their second language naturally in childhood.  The effort spent in studying and doing homework seems pointless when contrasted with the apparent ease that “natural” acquisition presents.  This feeling is not lost on teachers: without a theoretical basis for the methods, given any perceived slow progress of their students, they would feel that they have no choice but to be open to any new ideas         Taking a broad interpretation of this hypothesis, the main intent seems to be to convey how grammar study (learning) is less effective than simple exposure (acquisition).  This is something that very few researchers seem to doubt, and recent findings in the analysis of right hemisphere trauma indicate a clear separation of the facilities for interpreting context-independent sentences from context-dependent utterances (Paradis, 1998).  However, when called upon to clarify, Krashen takes the somewhat less defensible position that the two are completely unrelated and that grammar study has no place in language learning (Krashen 1993a, 1993b).  As several authors have shown (Gregg 1984, McLaughlin 1987, and Lightbown & Pienemann 1993, for a direct counter-argument to Krashen 1993a) there are countless examples of how grammar study can be of great benefit to students learning by some sort of communicative method. The Natural Order Hypothesis         The second hypothesis is simply that grammatical structures are learned in a predictable order.  Once again this is based on first language acquisition research done by Roger Brown, as well as that of Jill and Peter de Villiers.  These studies found striking similarities in the order in which children acquired certain grammatical morphemes.  Krashen cites a series of studies by Dulay and Burt which show that a group of Spanish speaking and a group of Chinese speaking children learning English as a second language also exhibited a “natural” order for grammatical morphemes which did not differ between the two groups.  A rather lengthy end-note directs readers to further research in first and second language acquisition, but somewhat undercuts the basic hypothesis by showing limitations to the concept of an order of acquisition.         Gregg argues that Krashen has no basis for separating grammatical morphemes from, for example, phonology.  Although Krashen only briefly mentions the existence of other parallel “streams” of acquisition in The Natural Approach, their very existence rules out any order that might be used in instruction.  The basic idea of a simple linear order of acquisition is extremely unlikely, Gregg reminds us.  In addition, if there are individual differences then the hypothesis is not provable, falsifiable, and in the end, not useful.         McLaughlin points out the methodological problems with Dulay and Burt’s 1974 study, and cites a study by Hakuta and Cancino (1977, cited in McLaughlin, 1987, p.32) which found that the complexity of a morpheme depended on the learner’s native language.  The difference between the experience of a speaker of a Germanic language studying English with that of an Asian language studying English is a clear indication of the relevance of this finding.  The contradictions for planning curriculum are immediately evident.  Having just discredited grammar study in the Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis, Krashen suddenly proposes that second language learners should follow the “natural” order of acquisition for grammatical morphemes.  The teacher is first instructed to create a natural environment for the learner but then, in trying to create a curriculum, they are instructed to base it on grammar.  As described below in an analysis of the actual classroom methods presented in the Natural Approach, attempting to put these conflicting theories into practice is very problematic.         When one examines this hypothesis in terms of comprehension and production, its insufficiencies become even more apparent.  Many of the studies of order of acquisition, especially those in first language acquisition, are based on production.  McLaughlin also points out that “correct usage” is not monolithic – even for grammatical morphemes, correct usage in one situation does not guarantee as correct usage in another (p.33).  In this sense, the term “acquisition” becomes very unclear, even when not applying Krashen’s definition.  Is a structure “acquired” when there are no mistakes in comprehension?  Or is it acquired when there is a certain level of accuracy in production?  First language acquisition is very closely linked to the cognitive development of infants, but second language learners have most of these facilities present, even as children.  Further, even if some weak form of natural order exists for any learners who are speakers of a given language, learning in a given environment, it is not clear that the order is the same for comprehension and production.  If these two orders differ, it is not clear how they would interact. The Monitor Hypothesis The role of conscious learning is defined in this somewhat negative hypothesis: The only role that such “learned” competence can have is an editor on what is produced.  Output is checked and repaired, after it has been produced, by the explicit knowledge the learner has gained through grammar study.  The implication is that the use of this Monitor should be discouraged and that production should be left up to some instinct that has been formed by “acquisition”.  Using the Monitor, speech is halting since it only can check what has been produced, but Monitor-free speech is much more instinctive and less contrived.  However, he later describes cases of using the Monitor efficiently (p. 32) to eliminate errors on “easy” rules.  This hypothesis presents very little in the way of supportive evidence:  Krashen cites several studies by Bialystok alone and with Frohlich as “confirming evidence” (p.31) and several of his own studies on the difficulty of confirming acquisition of grammar.         Perhaps Krashen’s recognition of this factor was indeed a step forward – language learners and teachers everywhere know the feeling that the harder they try to make a correct sentence, the worse it comes out.  However, he seems to draw the lines around it a bit too closely.  Gregg points (p.84) out that by restricting monitor use to “learned” grammar and only in production, Krashen in effect makes the Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis and the Monitor Hypothesis contradictory.  Gregg also points out that the restricting learning to the role of editing production completely ignores comprehension (p.82).  Explicitly learned grammar can obviously play a crucial role in understanding speech.         McLaughlin gives a thorough dissection of the hypothesis, showing that Krashen has never demonstrated the operation of the Monitor in his own or any other research.  Even the further qualification that it only works on discrete-point tests on one grammar rule at a time failed to produce evidence of operation.  Only one study (Seliger, cited on p.26) was able to find narrow conditions for its operation, and even there the conclusion was that it was not representative of the conscious knowledge of grammar.  He goes on to point out how difficult it is to determine if one is consciously employing a rule, and that such conscious editing actually interferes with performance.  But his most convincing argument is the existence of learners who have taught themselves a language with very little contact with native speakers.  These people are perhaps rare on the campuses of U.S. universities, but it is quite undeniable that they exist.         The role that explicitly learned grammar and incidentally acquired exposure have in forming sentences is far from clear.  Watching intermediate students practice using recasts is certainly convincing evidence that something like the Monitor is at work: even without outside correction, they can eliminate the errors in a target sentence or expression of their own ideas after several tries.  However, psycholinguists have yet to determine just what goes into sentence processing and bilingual memory.  In a later paper (Krashen 1991), he tried to show that high school students, despite applying spelling rules they knew explicitly, performed worse than college students who did not remember such rules.  He failed to address not only the relevance of this study to the ability to communicate in a language, but also the possibility that whether they remembered the rules or not, the college students probably did know the rules consciously at some point, which again violates the Learning-Acquisition Hypothesis. The Input Hypothesis         Here Krashen explains how successful “acquisition” occurs:  by simply understanding input that is a little beyond the learner’s present “level” – he defined that present “level” as i and the ideal level of input as i +1.  In the development of oral fluency, unknown words and grammar are deduced through the use of context (both situational and discursive), rather than through direct instruction.  Krashen has several areas which he draws on for proof of the Input Hypothesis.  One is the speech that parents use when talking to children (caretaker speech), which he says is vital in first language acquisition (p.34).  He also illustrates how good teachers tune their speech to their students’ level, and how when talking to each other, second language learners adjust their speech in order to communicate.  This hypothesis is also supported by the fact that often the first second language utterances of adult learners are very similar to those of infants in their first language.  However it is the results of methods such as Asher’s Total Physical Response that provide the most convincing evidence.  This method was shown to be far superior to audiolingual, grammar-translation or other approaches, producing what Krashen calls “nearly five times the [normal] acquisition rate.”         Gregg spends substantial time on this particular hypothesis, because, while it seems to be the core of the model, it is simply an uncontroversial observation with no process described and no proof provided.  He brings up the very salient point that perhaps practice does indeed also have something to do with second language acquisition, pointing out that monitoring could be used as a source of correct utterances (p. 87).  He also cites several studies that shed some doubt on the connection between caretaker speech in first language acquisition and simplified input in second language acquisition.         McLaughlin also gives careful and thorough consideration to this part of Krashen’s model.  He addresses each of the ten lines of evidence that Krashen presents, arguing that it is not sufficient to simply say that certain phenomenon can be viewed from the perspective of the Input Hypothesis.  The concept of a learner’s “level” is extremely difficult to define, just as the idea of i +1 is (p.37).  Further, there are many structures such as passives and yes/no questions that cannot be learned through context.  Also, there is no evidence that a learner has to fully comprehend an utterance for it to aid in acquisition.  Some of the first words that children and second language learners produce are formulaic expressions that are not fully understood initially.  Finally McLaughlin points out that Krashen simply ignores other internal factors such as motivation and the importance of producing language for interaction.         This hypothesis is perhaps the most appealing part of Krashen’s model for the language learner as well as the teacher.  He makes use of the gap between comprehension and production that everyone feels, enticing us with the hope of instant benefits if we just get the input tuned to the right level.  One of Krashen’s cleverest catch-alls is that other methods of teaching appear to work at times because they inadvertently provide this input.  But the disappointment is that he never gives any convincing idea as to how it works.  In the classroom a teacher can see when the students don’t understand and can simplify his or her speech to the point where they do.  Krashen would have the teacher think that this was all that is necessary, and it is just a matter of time before the students are able to express themselves freely.  However, Ellis (1992) points out that even as of his 1985 work (Krashen 1985), he still had not provided a single study that demonstrated the Input Hypothesis.  Over extended periods of time students do learn to understand more and even how to speak, but it often seems to take much longer than Krashen implies, indicating that there are perhaps many more factors involved.  More importantly, even given this beginning of i, and the goal of i + 1, indefinable as they are, the reader is given no indication of how to proceed.  As shown above the Natural Order Hypothesis holds no answers, especially as to how comprehension progresses.  In an indication of a direction that should be explored, Ellis’s exploratory study (ibid.) showed that it is the effort involved in attempting to understand input rather than simple comprehension that fuels acquisition. The Affective Filter Hypothesis         This concept receives the briefest treatment in “The Natural Approach”.  Krashen simply states that “attitudinal variables relate directly to language acquisition but not language learning.”  He cites several studies that examine the link between motivation and self-image, arguing that an “integrative” motivation (the learner want to “be like” the native speakers of a language) is necessary.  He postulates an “affective filter” that acts before the Language Acquisition Device and restricts the desire to seek input if the learner does not have such motivation.  Krashen also says that at puberty, this filter increases dramatically in strength.         Gregg notes several problems with this hypothesis as well.  Among others, Krashen seems to indicate that perhaps the affective filter is associated with the emotional upheaval and hypersensitivity of puberty, but Gregg notes that this would indicate that the filter would slowly disappear in adulthood, which Krashen does not allow for (p.92).  He also remarks on several operational details, such as the fact that simply not being unmotivated would be the same as being highly motivated in this hypothesis – neither is the negative state of being unmotivated.  Also, he questions how this filter would selectively choose certain “parts of a language” to reject (p.94).         McLaughlin argues much along the same lines as Gregg and points out that adolescents often acquire languages faster than younger, monitor-free children (p.29).  He concludes that while affective variables certainly play a critical role in acquisition, there is no need to theorize a filter like Krashen’s.         Again, the teacher in the classroom is enticed by this hypothesis because of the obvious effects of self-confidence and motivation.  However, Krashen seems to imply that teaching children, who don’t have this filter, is somehow easier, since “given sufficient exposure, most children reach native-like levels of competence in second languages” (p.47).  This obviously completely ignores the demanding situations that face language minority children in the U.S. every day.  A simplification into a one page “hypothesis” gives teachers the idea that these problems are easily solved and fluency is just a matter of following this path.  As Gregg and McLaughlin point out, however, trying to put these ideas into practice, one quickly runs into problems. Curriculum Design         The educational implications of Krashen’s theories become more apparent in the remainder of the book, where he and Terrell lay out the specific methods that make use of the Monitor Model.  These ideas are based on Terrell’s earlier work (Terrell, 1977) but have been expanded into a full curriculum.  The authors qualify this collection somewhat by saying that teachers can use all or part of the Natural Approach, depending on how it fits into their classroom.         This freedom, combined with the thoroughness of their curriculum, make the Natural Approach very attractive.  In fact, the guidelines they set out at the beginning– communication is the primary goal, comprehension preceding production, production simply emerge, acquisition activities are central, and the affective filter should be lowered (p. 58-60) – are without question, excellent guidelines for any language classroom.  The compilation of topics and situations (p.67-70) which make up their curriculum are a good, broad overview of many of the things that students who study by grammar translation or audiolingual methods do not get.  The list of suggested rules (p.74) is notable in its departure from previous methods with its insistence on target language input but its allowance for partial, non-grammatical or even L1 responses.         Outside of these areas, application of the suggestions run into some difficulty.  Three general communicative goals of being able to express personal identification, experiences and opinions (p.73) are presented, but there is no theoretical background.  The Natural Approach contains ample guidance and resources for the beginner levels, with methods for introducing basic vocabulary and situations in a way that keeps students involved.  It also has very viable techniques for more advanced and self-confident classes who will be stimulated by the imaginative situational practice (starting on p.101).  However, teachers of the broad middle range of students who have gotten a grip on basic vocabulary but are still struggling with sentence and question production are left with conflicting advice.         Once beyond one-word answers to questions, the Natural Approach ventures out onto thin ice by suggesting elicited productions.  These take the form of open-ended sentences, open dialogs and even prefabricated patterns (p.84).  These formats necessarily involve explicit use of grammar, which violates every hypothesis of the Monitor Model.  The authors write this off as training for optimal Monitor use (p.71, 142), despite Krashen’s promotion of “Monitor-free” production.  Even if a teacher were to set off in this direction and begin to introduce a “structure of the day” (p. 72), once again there is no theoretical basis for what to choose.  Perhaps the most glaring omission is the lack of any reference to the Natural Order Hypothesis, which as noted previously, contained no realistically usable information for designing curriculum.         Judging from the emphasis on exposure in the Natural Approach and the pattern of Krashen’s later publications, which focused on the Input Hypothesis, the solution to curriculum problems seems to be massive listening.  However, as noted before, other than i + 1, there is no theoretical basis for overall curriculum design regarding comprehension.  Once again, the teacher is forced to rely on a somewhat dubious “order of acquisition”, which is based on production anyway.  Further, the link from exposure to production targets is tenuous at best.  Consider the dialog presented on p.87: . . . to the question What is the man doing in this picture? the students may reply run.  The instructor expands the answer.  Yes, that’s right, he’s running.

• Mental Processes
• Comprehension

Comprehensible Input and Krashen's theory

• Journal of Classics Teaching 20(39):37-44
• 20(39):37-44
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4. The Comprehension Hypothesis Extended

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Chapters in this book (21)