Applying the Comprehension Hypothesis: Some Suggestions

Many EFL classes include the composing process, but it is not clear if this is necessary or will always be necessary. There is some evidence that at least aspects of the composing process transfer across languages (Lee and Krashen, 2002); it may only necessarily to expose students to these ideas in the first language.

OUR GOAL: AUTONOMOUS ACQUIRERS

We don’t need return business in the language education profession. Our goal in foreign language pedagogy is to bring students to the point where they are autonomous acquirers, prepared to continue to improve on their own.

In terms of the Comprehension Hypothesis, an "autonomous acquirer" has two characteristics:

The autonomous acquirer has acquired enough of the second language so that at least some authentic input is comprehensible, enough to ensure progress and the ability to acquire still more language.
The autonomous acquirer will understand the language acquisition process. The autonomous acquirer will know that progress comes from comprehensible input, not from grammar study and vocabulary lists, and will understand ways of making input more comprehensible (e.g. getting background information, avoiding obviously incomprehensible input).

An autonomous acquirer is not a perfect speaker of the second language, just good enough to continue to improve without us. This is, of course, the goal of all education – not to produce masters but to allow people to begin work in their profession and to continue to grow.

THE USE OF THE FIRST LANGUAGE

The Comprehension Hypothesis helps us with the issue of whether and how to use the student’s first language in foreign language education. The Comprehension Hypothesis predicts that the first language helps when it is used to make input more comprehensible: This happens when we use the first language to provide background information. This could be in the form of short readings or explanations by the teacher before a complex topic is presented. Information provided in the first language can help the same way pictures and relia can help at the beginning level, as context that makes input more comprehensible.

The Comprehension Hypothesis predicts that first language use can hurt when it is used in ways that do not encourage comprehensible input. This happens when we translate and students have no need to attend to the second language input.

Research from the field of bilingual education is consistent with these predictions. In general, bilingual programs have been shown to be quite successful in helping language minority children acquire the majority language. In these programs, literacy is developed in the primary language, which transfers to the second language, and subject matter is taught in the primary language in early stages to provide background knowledge (Krashen, 1996a). One version of bilingual education, however, "concurrent translation," in which teachers present the same message in both languages using sentence-by-sentence translation, has not been shown to be effective (Legarreta, 1979).

The Comprehension Hypothesis thus predicts that a quality education in the primary language is an excellent investment for later second language development.