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Input is necessary but not sufficient. | ||
Tags: Comprehensive input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 36 22 December 2014 at 7:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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Methods which emphasize input are very popular these days. Some people claim that
enough input will lead to fluent output. I thought this too. I learned a couple of languages to a decent C1/C2 level without doing any formal training that included production. However I learned these languages in countries where they were spoken and I had massive practice using the languages. My experience learning the language on my own with no immersion is quite different. My experience is that if you lack immersion, you learn what you study. This is really not a point of controversy; how would you learn anything else, other than through some sort of magic language acquisition device, such as those proposed by Krashen and Chomsky. Krashen is probably right, but incomplete, in his insights to language acquisition. There are counter examples: 1. Many people report learners who have reached high levels of comprehension with little skill in production. 2.Swain at http://www.celea.org.cn/2007/keynote/ppt/merrill%20swain.pdf suggests that even after years of comprehensible input English speaking students in Canada match their French speaking peers in comprehension, but not in output. 3. It is difficult to know how to interpret the anecdotal evidence from this forum, about the skills of people who have ony used input oriented methods. Some who have had great success with massive input, also have family members or friends who give them the opportunity to practice. It is very difficult to understand the interaction between input and output at the beginner level. Clearly you need comprehensible input, how else will you learn anything. However, it seems to me that you also need a chance to practice and produce comprehensible output (for a native speaker), so that you can learn the features of a language that are not needed to comprehend an incoming message, but are needed to produce a grammatical utterance for a native speaker. My point in writing this post is that I think I was way too impressed with input as the golden road to fluency. This viewpoint matched my training and my experience as a language learner. However this has not been my experience as a part time language learner. There seems to be little limit as to how far I can go in improving my comprehension, but my output only improves with oral work like FSI, shadowing, or that magic of conversation with a native speaker... I would love it if I could just read or listen my way to fluency, but I don't think it works past a very basic level. Edited by sfuqua on 22 December 2014 at 7:02am 12 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4962 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 2 of 36 22 December 2014 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was impressed with massive input in the form of extensive reading/listening as quasi
exclusive approach, but I think I could have done better with half the time I spent on input and using the remaining time for output or at least intensive reading. I'm still impressed how people still make absolute claims on language learning based only on learning related languages to their own, e.g. Romance languages. When you learn a non-transparent language, you need a lot more reassertion of what you learn in order to consciously know the vocabulary and output comes in handy, even if as simple translation exercises. Massive input worked for me with Papiamento, because after learning a few simple grammar rules and the odd Dutch word I was reading the language in C1 level, and all that was left was getting used to its sound so I could listen to it in C1 as well. But then most of my learning consist of non-transparent languages: Georgian, Chinese, Russian, Norwegian and Estonian, and shifting to extensive reading at a low level of comprehension has been disastrous. Like I said, I'd be better off with only half the time of extensive activities and the rest with short sessions of intensive reading and of writing so that my brain adapted better to families of words that were totally unrelated. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5328 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 36 22 December 2014 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like massive input a lot, and I've benefited from it tremendously. But I've also done lots of output work: lang-8, speaking French at home, working with an exam tutor, MCD cards, and so on. With a purely input-based approach, it's possible to gloss over all kinds of little details, such as case endings in German.
Sure, many people see massive gains from reading. And some people really do reach native levels of writing via massive input. But this is all just a matter of dueling case studies: I can produce multiple heritage learners with solid comprehension who appear to be unable to speak. So if you want to speak and write, it's probably worth putting yourself in situations where you need to speak and write on a regular basis. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4050 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 36 22 December 2014 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm still a beginner to language learning so I haven't really made up my mind on this topic, but I think the way it's always phrased as "does input automatically lead to output?" misses out on a lot of nuances of the discussion.
I think it's worth mentioning that all output starts as input. When a learner who knows nothing learns their first sentence, the teacher says a sentence, the learner hears it and the learner repeats the sentence. So I think with enough input you should theoretically eventually get perfect output, but it would probably take longer than a life time to memorize every sentence you would ever want to say, so the learner has to be able mix and match pieces of sentences. What I've noticed lately though is that it's easier to mix and match with some languages than others, a Russian learner can't mix and match what they've heard without either mastering the Russian case system or hearing a word in many many different contexts. But a learner of a language like Japanese has far fewer complications to worry about and newly heard word can easily be dropped in a familiar sentence patterns without much worry. I also notice that just recognizing a word may not mean you know it well enough to say it. A learner studying English passively who sees the word 'gregarious' may be able to recognize it without knowing every individual syllable because it's so different from the words around it. Doing passive speaking and writing activities like shadowing and scriptorium don't require you to build original sentences, but they do require you to reproduce every syllable of a word, which is more difficult than simply recognizing it in a sentence. But theoretically with long enough exposure a listener would eventually recognize all the syllables especially if the word was placed by other similar words and they had to listen more carefully in order to differentiate between them. I'm still testing a lot of ideas I have on the subject out and I don't know how this ends up working at higher levels but I think this kind of discussion needs to recognize that there's more of a gradient between input and output than a distinct line between the two. And I think some grammatical features present bigger hurdles in transitioning from input to output than others. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 36 22 December 2014 at 7:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm yet to see such a "report" about someone who's done enough reading AND enough listening. Usually it's very lopsided. For me it's not so much input only as comprehension first. I'm all for cheating as much as possible to achieve comprehension. And I'll be the first to admit that sometimes the more formal material can save you from boring repetition and boredom in general. They can help the consolidation for sure, especially if you have limited resources/find subs2srs too complicated etc. Speaking of that, it's worth pointing out that input advocates generally assume input+SRS. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5328 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 36 22 December 2014 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
OK, let me use a friend as an example: 1. She was a native speaker of her mother's language until age 6 or 7, when she stopped speaking it in an effort to fit in at school. 2. Her mother continued to speak the language at home until my friend left for college. 3. She reads the language on the Facebook feeds of her friends and family. 4. She watches challenging adult TV in the language without any problem (gritty modern cop shows, etc.) 5. She does not believe that she can produce a single grammatical sentence in her mother's tongue, and she was openly envious of my dodgy B1 French. Now, the question is, does this qualify as "enough reading AND enough listening"? We're looking at 6 or 7 years of native exposure starting from birth, plus almost another decade and half of hearing the language constantly, watching TV in it, reading Facebook feeds, etc. I can produce more examples, though the others are less dramatic: For example, I know kids who can follow complex instructions in their heritage language ("HL"), and who enjoy HL audio books, but who have never produced two consecutive HL sentences to the best of my knowledge. My hypothesis: There exist quite a few people who won't learn how to speak a language unless they actually need to speak it. This is how immersed children can become conversational in 3 months, but kids in bilingual households can get 18 years of input without developing active skills.
Khatzumoto also switched from SRS sentences to MCD/cloze cards which hid particles, prepositions and inflections. This is a kind of very primitive active practice that forces people to pay attention to details. I plan to do this with Spanish once I get my comprehension up a bit. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4329 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 36 22 December 2014 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have no idea how good heritage learners really are, but I have the feeling I am at this sort of at this level now via massive input. I can watch most movies without much difficulty - I watched the dubbed version of Silver Linings Playbook last night and was surprised that I could follow the dubbed manic conversations very easily - at the same time my spoken German is by no means as rich as I would like, and my writing virtually none existent. However, I am not sure that this suggests that massive input won't lead to good output at some point. My best guess is that my vocabulary is somewhere in the 7000-8000 word-group range - which means I can pick up novels and read them or look at movies with pretty good understanding - but at the same time even in vocabulary terms I am a long way from a average native speaker (or even an average teenager). And if grammar exposure tracks vocabulary exposure, then I am also a long way from the sort of grammar exposure that even a standard teenagers has in their L1. I have the feeling that another year or two of pretty intensive input will start leading to noticeable improvements in output - though I certainly see the benefits of some sort of daily writing practice at some point. I think there are two very useful aspects of living in a country that speaks your L2: I have access to tons and tons of native materials for very low cost (e.g., our library - has tons of books, dvds, audio books - and only costs 10 euros/year - our local videostore has 1000s of movies - I have a choice of 5 different low cost streaming services etc); and perhaps more importantly I can stay in my TL for a long time without getting pulled back into my L1. I suspect most people on HTLAL are pleased if they can spend 3 hours/day on their TL - I spend a minimum of 12 hours/day every day (HTLAL is probably my biggest source of non-German). I think massive input works when the country you live in uses your L2 (I've heard of native English speakers getting similar results in Polish and Japanese so I don't think this just applies to related languages and my mother achieved the reverse going from Lithuanian to English in the 1940s), but it works in part because you can put in lots and lots of hours at low cost, which are hard to replicate in other situations. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4329 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 8 of 36 22 December 2014 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
Our posts crossed, but that's exactly what I was getting at. I am at a very similar level. I agree that cloze deletions and other active practice would help my active output skills. And would probably be more efficient than simply doing more input. But at the same time I don't think that I am so advanced or have had so much input (it's only 2.5 years after all), and I have the sense that if I can only get a bit better at my language input things will really open up for me, and I'll be able to actively live very comfortably in native materials (this has more or less happened now for TV/movies - but not as comfortably for high-end radio or complex novels or newspapers). I have the sense that 1-2 more years of work will get me there though, and then I think output will just start naturally improving - though I don't disagree that active work on output is important. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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