Applying the Comprehension Hypothesis: Some Suggestions
Stephen Krashen
Presented at 13th International Symposium and Book
Fair on Language Teaching (English Teachers
Association of the Republic of China), Taipei, Taiwan,
November, 13, 2004.
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This paper consists of three parts: (1) A brief review of the Comprehension Hypothesis; (2) How the Comprehension Hypothesis helps settle some seemingly never-ending controversies in the field; and (3) some ideas for application to the English as a foreign language situation. |
THE COMPREHENSION HYPOTHESIS
My goal in this paper is to discuss some possible pedagogical applications of the Comprehension Hypothesis, a hypothesis I consider to be the core of current language acquisition theory.
The Comprehension Hypothesis states that we acquire language when we understand messages, when we understand what people tell us and when we understand what we read.
The Comprehension Hypothesis also applies to literacy: Our reading ability, our ability to write in an acceptable writing style, our spelling ability, vocabulary knowledge, and our ability to handle complex syntax is the result of reading.
Until a few years ago, I referred to this hypothesis as the Input Hypothesis, a term I still consider to be acceptable. I have come to prefer “Comprehension Hypothesis,” because it more accurately reflects what the hypothesis says.
The Comprehension Hypothesis is not new with me. In the field of second language acquisition, James Asher and Harris Winitz discussed the importance of comprehension years before I did. In the field of reading instruction, Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith hypothesized that “we learn to read by reading, “ we learn to read by understanding what is on the page.
The Comprehension Hypothesis is not a wild idea, the result of staying up all night drinking cheap wine. It is, rather, conservative, an effort to make sense of and be consistent with a wide body of academic research.
For a hypothesis to survive, it must be consistent with all the research: there can be no exceptions. I have argued that this has been exactly the case with respect to the Comprehension Hypothesis: It is consistent with research in several different fields and continues to be validated, and potential counterexamples have been easily dealt with. I will not review this research here; some of it has been presented at ETA meetings in the past (Krashen, 2002a) and in detail in several books (e.g. Krashen, 2002b).
The Comprehension Hypothesis is closely related to other hypotheses. The Comprehension Hypothesis refers to subconscious acquisition, not conscious learning. The result of providing acquirers with comprehensible input is the emergence of grammatical structure in a predictable order. A strong affective filter (e.g. high anxiety) will prevent input from reaching those parts of the brain that do language acquisition.
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