Comprehensible Input: Understand to Learn

Imagine two students. The first student watches a movie in English with no subtitles and understands nothing. The second student listens to a slow story with pictures and understands almost everything. Which student will learn more? Most teachers say the second student, and a linguist named Stephen Krashen explains why.

Krashen says that we learn a language when we understand messages in it. He calls this comprehensible input. It means language that you can follow, even if you do not know every word. His famous formula is "i plus one". The letter i is your level today, and plus one is one small step above it. If the material is exactly at your level, you learn little. If it is far above your level, you feel lost. The best material is a little harder than what you already know.

For a beginner, comprehensible input can be a short story with clear pictures, a slow dialogue between two people, or a song with simple words. You can guess new words from the picture, the situation or the words around them. When you guess correctly, your brain remembers the word more deeply than when you only read a translation.

There is one more important point. Input needs to be interesting. When you enjoy a story, you listen longer, and you return to it again. A boring text may be easy, but you will not want to read it twice.

Here is a simple plan. Choose one short story. Read it first with the pictures. Then listen to it two times. After that, answer a few questions about the story. If you understand most of it, move to the next story. If you do not, go back one step and choose something easier.

You do not need to understand every single word. A learner who understands about nine words out of ten can usually guess the tenth. This is the place where real learning happens.