Language Acquisition: Comprehensible Input and Effective Filter

Language is acquired through comprehensible input in a low-anxiety environment, regardless of individual variation or teaching methods.

### The Universal Process of Language Acquisition: Comprehensible Input and the Effective Filter
* 🗣 Stephen Krashen argues that all humans acquire language the same way: through **comprehensible input** in a **low-anxiety environment**.
* 👶 Krashen shares a personal story of a young Japanese girl, Itomi, who acquired English after **five months of silent listening**, before suddenly **starting to speak**.
* 🧠 The "input hypothesis" posits that **we acquire language when we understand messages**, with speaking not considered practicing.
* 🖼 Visual aids, such as **Mr. Spock in a German lesson**, can help make input comprehensible and aid language acquisition.
* 😰 The "effective filter hypothesis" suggests that motivation, self-esteem, and anxiety can act as barriers to language acquisition, with **zero anxiety being ideal**.
* 🏫 Krashen emphasizes the importance of creating a **low-anxiety environment** in language learning, where students feel **safe to receive and process input**.
* 🔒 The "**effective filter**" concept explains why some students may struggle to acquire language despite receiving comprehensible input.
* 🌍 Krashen concludes that "we acquire language in **one way, and only one way**, when we get **comprehensible input in a low-anxiety environment**."

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huh meows meow Tookie jung sung-ho bamboo down, and they we all know except I again couldn't hold me to get them net Kakashi. I'm gonna pushing your parameter insomnia how do we acquire language, and I'd like to begin this discussion to this presentation with an outrageous statement. In my opinion, we all acquire language the same way. The reason this is an outrageous thing to say is that these days in education we're living in an age of individual variation. We're very concerned about how our students are different, not how our students are the same. All those who've been around in the field for a while remember oh about 15-20 years ago, people were very concerned about something called field dependent learners and field independent learners. You give people a certain test, and one group gets this treatment, one who gets the other. Then about 15 years ago, it was left side of the brain, right side of the brain. So, people are left hemisphere thinkers, some people are right hemisphere. Then about ten years ago, cognitive style.

cognitive style. The home culture differs from the cognitive style of the school culture. We have a clash, etc. Well, each of the examples I gave you is probably correct. There is individual variation, and there is quite a bit of it. Nevertheless, there are some things all do the same. Let me give you some examples. Digestion. We all digest food the same. No significant individual variation. First, you put it in your mouth. Then you chew it up. Then it goes down your throat. Then into your stomach. That's how it's done everywhere. That's how it's done in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa. That's how it's done everywhere in the world. The visual system is the same everywhere. It's always the occipital lobe in the back of the brain. It's never in the side of the brain. It's never in the front of the brain. It's never in the elbow. It's done exactly the same everywhere you go. We all acquire language the same. And rather than just talk about it, I'd like to show you. I'd like to take just a

couple of minutes and give you some sample language lessons. I'll use a language that I'm sure you've heard before, and maybe some of you speak, and you can tell me which of these two very brief lessons you like better. Here's lesson number one: The vet against unfuckin Deutsch - Hammond won't if Merton Faro saggin does not my name item deutsches i Nazaire sure know waka on eco fur does the allah's f feel at home mid to H hub in Vietnam. What do you think? Good lesson so far? Do you think if I kept talking to you like that, you'd pick up German? Not very likely. How about if I repeated it? Would that help? Probably not. How about if I said it louder? Would that help? Probably not. How about if I said it and you repeated it back? Again, I don't think that would help. How about if I wrote it out for you and you could see it on your television screen? That wouldn't help either. How about if I wrote it out for

you and you copied it down. How about if I wrote it out for you and deleted every fifth word, and you tried to guess what the word is. The truth is that none of these things help, none of these things mean anything, and I hope you can see that now. Here's lesson number two, and for this, you have to watch me carefully. This is mine. A hundred NZ does hunt everyone. Say yeah. I can hear you even though the TV audience. Good, huh? That's his main cup. Lindsey cope via good from here. I'll draw a picture. Hope it's good. Yeah, sure. Hope this is Mr. Spock. Yeah, Mr. Spock. Hot spy orin. Orin 14z. Oren. It had sly. Oren. Okay, Mr. Spock. Yeah, sure. Okay. Alden Stanzi algún. Algun we filled out the client's dry. Dry algún. Try out. Is that lipstick dry algún nein? They're having a dry outcome. Once which doesn't want. Okay, here's that cigarette. Oh, yeah. Nice cigarette. Is it nice? Good if you

understood lesson number two not every word but more or less. I did everything necessary to teach you German, and now I'm going to share with you the most important thing I have learned about language. Probably the best-kept secret in the profession: we acquire language in one way and only one way 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 they 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 exercises, computers, etc., but the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand: comprehensible input. Now, one of the reasons lesson number two was better than lesson number one is we had Mr. Spock to help us out. So anything that helps make input comprehensible: pictures, knowledge of the world, realia, etc., helps language acquisition. If comprehensible input is true, what we

call the input hypothesis is true other thing follow from it and very important corollary. The input hypothesis is this and this may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you certainly came as a surprise to me talking is not practicing talking is not practicing. What does this mean means if you want to prove 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 helped now I think they don't on the other hand if we were 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. Now we have a lot of evidence that this is true and the evidence is in the professional.

literature in books and journal papers, etc. And if you're an insomniac, you're welcome to look at all that. But rather than go through that, I'd like instead to tell you a story that illustrates the same point. I've used the story for a long time, so those who have heard it before, I've been using this for about 15 years. And the reason I've kept staying with it is that it makes the point very well. And I've discovered it's just about a universal experience. What has happened to me has certainly happened to you. And bear in mind, if you've heard it before and you're tired of hearing it, think how I feel. 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 College 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 us was owned by a Japanese company.

every year, there'd 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 Ito me. And I didn't know about this Tyrael a language acquisition. Then nobody did. And I thought then the way you get people to acquire language is you get them to practice talking. So I try to get her to talk. I'd say, yeah, you told me talk to me, say good morning, say hi. No response. Well, clearly I decided I've got to make this more concrete. He told me, say ball. No response. Well, obviously I've got to break it down to it into its component parts. Let's work on initial consonants. Say ba, look at my lips again. No response. There's a theory going around then that 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, he told me 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. Children during this stage do pick up certain expressions from the other children in the neighborhood. There is not real language. They understand approximately what they mean. It's not, again, it's not real language. They have a rough idea what it means. They use it in roughly appropriate situations. Things like leave me alone, get out of here. In fact, one child I knew, the only thing could say was I kick your ass, said it everywhere. Wasn't quite sure what it meant. After about five months, he told me started to speak. And several things were interesting about her language. First, it looked a lot like first language.

acquisition. The same process our children went through: one word, two words, gradually getting more complicated. Second, it came quickly. By the time Ito, me, 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. Let me repeat that: 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. Now, a silent period for a child in a situation like this is not pathological, it's normal, it's what you expect. He'd like to have a silent period, wouldn't you? How would it be if he had to study another language but he went to a class where you didn't have to say anything? Doesn't that sound wonderful? You can talk all you want.

can raise your hand. You can volunteer, but no one's gonna call on you. No one's gonna put you on the spot. Also, in this perfect class, if the input is incomprehensible, it's the teacher's fault, not yours. That's how we're doing it now, and the results we're getting aren't a little better than other methods. They're actually much, much better. Before I leave this topic, let me put in a brief commercial message for speaking. I'm not opposed to speaking. I think when students speak, it's fine, 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 a conversation, what counts is the input that you can stimulate from other people. So, I'm in favor of student speaking, but we have to understand it makes an indirect, a helpful but indirect contribution to language acquisition. I'd like to discuss one more hypothesis before we move on to literacy, and this is a very important one called the effective filter hypothesis. Our research in language acquisition has concluded.

that there are several factors that are recent relate to success in language acquisition, and I'm going to list them here on your screen. One factor is motivation. Students who are more motivated do better in language acquisition. Those of you who study this know that it's a little more complicated than this, but this is a good approximation. Second, self-esteem, probably the dominant concept today in popular psychology. Students with more self-esteem, more self-confidence, do better in language acquisition. Third, anxiety, and here the correlations are negative. The lower the anxiety, the better the language acquisition. In fact, my hypothesis is for language acquisition to really succeed, anxiety should be zero. This has happen to you. Have you ever been in a situation speaking a language that you may not speak very well, when the conversation gets so interesting you temporarily forget that you're using another language? If this is happening to you, that's when you're acquiring. When your focus is completely on the message, what the other person is saying, and your anxiety is temporarily gone. By the way.

is an important footnote to this, I guess today we say sidebar. As a sidebar to all this, I'm not sure that zero anxiety is right for everything. I'm sure it's good for a lot of things, but I'm not quite sure how far to push this. Speaking to you as a college teacher, speaking to you as a parent, I'm not all that free and easy. I think there are certain things in school children absolutely must learn. I think my students at the University of Southern California should suffer. We have hard classes, tough requirements. You don't do the work, you're out. I finally learned what they tried to teach us in educational psychology. The amount of drive or anxiety necessary to accomplish a task depends on the task. Sometimes 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 to succeed, anxiety has to be directed somewhere else, not at the language. Frank Smith puts it this way: For the child to develop literacy, the child has to assume that she's going

to be successful, the way we integrate this into the theory is like this: if a 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 effective filter. Here's how it works: somewhere in the brain, Chomsky tells us, is a language acquisition device. Our job is to get input into the device. So, that's input here: low motivation, low self-esteem, high anxiety. The block goes up, the filter goes up, and the input cannot get in. This explains how it can be that we can have two children in the same class, 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.

I'll summarize it in one sentence, and we'll wonder 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.

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The Acquisition of Language: A Common Process

Acquiring language follows a universal process, despite the current focus on individual variations in education.

While there is significant individual variation in learning, certain processes like digestion and the visual system are universally consistent.

The speaker emphasizes that, similarly, the acquisition of language is a common process across all cultures and regions.

The Key to Language Acquisition: Comprehensible Input

Lesson number one uses ineffective methods to teach German, such as repetition and writing out the words.

In contrast, lesson number two focuses on providing comprehensible input through visuals and context, which is crucial for language acquisition.

The key to learning a language is through understanding messages, known as comprehensible input, rather than focusing on how the language is spoken or written.

The Ineffectiveness of Practicing Language Speaking

Practicing speaking a language does not effectively help in language acquisition, as supported by the input hypothesis.

Anecdotal evidence from the director of English as a Second Language at Queens College illustrates the point.

The common belief that practicing talking is crucial for language development is challenged by the experience of trying to teach English to a non-English speaking child.

The Role of Comprehensible Input in Language Acquisition

Children go through a silent period during language acquisition, where they pick up expressions and understand the meaning without speaking.

The start of speaking is not the beginning of language acquisition, but the result of comprehensible input over time.

A silent period in language learning is normal and can lead to better results, as seen in current teaching methods.

Motivation plays a crucial role in the success of language acquisition, as more motivated students tend to perform better.

Self-esteem and self-confidence are also key factors in language acquisition, with students who possess these qualities showing higher levels of success.

Anxiety has a negative correlation with language acquisition, and for success, it is essential for anxiety to be minimized, allowing the focus to be entirely on the language being acquired.

The Significance of Comprehensible Input in Language Acquisition

Low motivation, low self-esteem, and high anxiety create a mental block, known as the effective filter, that prevents language acquisition.

The effective filter stops the input from reaching the language acquisition device in the brain, explaining why some individuals struggle to make progress in language learning.

Language is acquired effectively in a low-anxiety environment through comprehensible input.