I've seen quite a bit on this sub about Comprehensible Input. The big idea here seems to be that first you just kind of 'watch' the language at first and gradually understand more and more- you don't throw yourself into using it right away.
The more I think about this, the more sense it makes to me as someone who teaches people English for a living. As English teachers the standard is to set up a kind of laboratory. We feed in vocabulary, we lead students through the process of understanding the rules of the language and then we invite them to use it. What this tends to produce, however, is many different "alternative versions" of the language. It's quite possible to know lots of words and to follow the grammar rules pretty strictly, and still come up with English phrases that make very little sense.
I've also been a prime example of falling prey to this. When I lived in northern Uganda I spent a long time learning the local language (Lango) so as to be able to interview people. I spent a lot of time building up vocabulary and working out how the language worked as a system. I also started speaking right away. However, it would have made a lot more sense to have done interviews right from the get-go, with an interpreter/research assistant, and to have used the interviews as a base for starting to understand how the language was used in real conversation.
My question is this however - if Comprehensible Input is the way to go, what does that mean for language lessons in a classroom or from online resources? Would you just wait and start them later? Would you just not need them in the same way?
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