3.1.1. Getting lots of comprehensible input in stage II

At this stage, comprehensible input can start to take off. Perhaps you can comprehend many snatches of the speech that you hear around you, but it does not provide you with massive comprehensible input. To get comprehensible input in large quantities you need to get people to talk you in such a way that the content of what they say is fairly predictable. You may benefit from other input as well. Already, there will be various highly routine events which you have learned to participate in, and to talk about. But in terms of input which will be both comprehensible, and moderately challenging, and which will steadily increase your vocabulary and your ability to understand speech in general, it will be the long stretches of relatively predictable speech that will help you the most. You will probably depend largely on your LRP to provide this concentrated comprehensible input, though other friends can help out.

A typical pattern will be to have your LRP talk to you in your session, and record what she says on tape. You will then listen to the tape on your own time, noting parts you do not understand or have questions about. Then you will go over the tape bit by bit with the LRP in a subsequent session, discussing what she said and getting your questions answered. By that time you will be thoroughly familiar with the taped material and can listen to it again on your own time, repeatedly, with full or nearly full comprehension. A final step might be to attempt to retell the material in your own words. You could do this first with your LRP in the language session, and record your effort. Then, together with your LRP, listen to your recording, and get her to give you pointers on ways you might better have expressed yourself. Finally, retell the material in your own words to various friends during social visits. This basic pattern--tape the LRP, listen to the tape privately, go over the tape with the LRP, listen to the tape privately, retell the material in your own words to several people--can be used with many of the activities I discuss here. So let's get on with getting some comprehensible input.

The first category of comprehensible input has been illustrated already when I talked about having someone tell you the story of Goldilocks. You may not know the word for bear, but I bet you'll catch on to it quickly and remember it permanently. The same will be true of a variety of other new vocabulary and possibly even some new sentence patterns. But just a minute. What if your LRP doesn't know the story of Goldilocks? Well, if she can read, you may be able to provide the story in another language for her to read. If not, you can get a fellow language learner to help out by telling such stories to a bilingual LRP in whatever other language she knows. You can return the favour by telling the bilingual LRP stories which she can retell to your fellow language learner in the same way.

When your fellow language learner has told this bilingual LRP the story of Goldilocks, or Little Red Riding Hood, or The Three Pigs, the LRP doesn't need to let you know which story it is. When the LRP begins telling you the story in your new language, you will get to guess which story it is. Likewise when you have told the bilingual LRP a story for retelling to your fellow language learner, you can sit and observe as s/he attempts to identify the story.

There won't be a large number of stories that are as familiar as Goldilocks, but you can easily familiarize yourself with a number of simple stories from children's books or other sources which can be used for this purpose. On one occasion my LRP was familiar with Bible stories, as were my co-learner and I, and he used this technique with us. This allowed for some very lengthy stories, such as the Old Testament story of Joseph. (If a modern idiomatic translation of the Bible or any other familiar book exists in the language you are learning, you will find that regular reading provides a good source of comprehensible input, and you can also have someone read such material aloud into a tape recorder for you to listen to privately.)

Such stories are a good means of getting started in understanding long sequences of connected sentences. In addition to fairy stories and stories from long ago, recent events in the community or in the world may be well known to both your LRP and you. Also, you and your LRP can engage in various activities together. For example, you might attend some spectators' event, or a wedding, or go planting or hunting together, or make a trip to the market, or to the big city, or to some special attraction in the big city. Afterward you can get your LRP to tell a fellow language learner, in great detail, all that you and she did together. This may not be all that comprehensible to your fellow language learner, but it will be great comprehensible input for you. Since you are well aware of everything you did together, what she says will be predictable enough to make it good Stage II input.

A well-known language learning method dating from the nineteenth century will be most fruitful during Stage II, since it provides predictable spoken input. This is the Series Method. It can be used for practicing speaking or comprehension, but my main focus at this point is on comprehension. Have your LRP provide you with comprehensible input by telling you in great detail each step in many familiar processes and activities. Such a sequence of details, or steps in an activity or process, is called a series. Consider the example of washing one's hands. How do you do it? First you turn on the cold water tap. Then, you turn on the hot water tap while feeling the water. If it gets too hot, you turn down the hot water or turn up the cold water. Then you hold your hands in the running water. When your hands are wet, you pick up the soap. You rub the soap all over both hands. Suds form on your hands. You put the soap back down. You then rub your hands all over each other, briskly. Then your rinse the soap off your hands. You pick up the towel. You rub the towel briskly over both hands. Then you hang the towel back up.

Another example might be all the steps in making a pot of tea. Moran (1990) provides a sequence of pictures for this particular series, which may help to prime your LRP. However, it seems likely that you could come up with a lot more steps in the process than are illustrated there. The same is true of Romijn and Seely (1988), which provides series-like sequences for use with Total Physical Response; that is, the language learner is actually supposed to act out the series, as each instruction is given by the LRP. If you have a hard time coming up with ideas for series, keep a running list of everything you do throughout an entire day. You will end up with enough ideas for series to keep you going for awhile. For additional ideas, take a walk, and make notes of the human activities that you observe. Some of them will be familiar to you, being similar to activities in your own culture, and others will be unfamiliar. It is the familiar ones that are most useful to you at this point, since they are predictable to you. The unfamiliar ones are more appropriate at Stage III when you will work at becoming familiar with new topics.

If you put a little thought into it, you can use the series method in a variety of ways. To use the example of washing hands, you can have the LRP simply tell you how she does it in general: “First I turn on the cold water tap. Then, I turn on the hot water tap...”. But you can also have her do it right while she performs the activities (or mimes them), “I am turning on the cold water tap. Now, I am turning on the hot water tap...”. Or you can have her tell you how she is later going to wash her hands before eating: “First I will turn on the cold water tap. Then, I will turn on the hot water tap...”. And you can use various complicated patterns: “First I turn on the cold water tap. After I have turned on the cold water tap, I turn on the hot water tap. After I have turned on the hot water tap, I pick up the soap. After I have picked up the soap...”. Get all the mileage you can out of this method in terms of increasing your ability to understand specific types of sentences. What those sentence patterns will be will depend on which language you are learning. But as a new pattern comes to your attention, the Series Method will sometimes provide a means of exposing yourself to a lot of comprehensible input which highlights that pattern.

Recall that you are tape-recording all of this comprehensible input. That way you can listen to it numerous times. There is another important use of these tapes. They will contain a lot of new vocabulary. You can go through them with your LRP and spot each new vocabulary item in context. As you do this, make a second tape--a vocabulary tape. In the vocabulary tape, the LRP first says the vocabulary item, and then repeats the entire sentence in which it occurred, and then says the isolated vocabulary item again. If you are a full-time language learner, and your sessions with your LRP (or LRPs) are two hours long or longer, you may be able to add twenty-five or thirty new vocabulary items to this tape every day. You can privately listen to the new items of the day several times, along with some review items. You may be surprised how easily you learn the new vocabulary and how well you retain it. The LRP may need to choose some basic form of a vocabulary item to use when saying the word in isolation. For verbs, this might be an infinitive form (to slurp) or a first person singular form (I slurp) or a third person singular form (s/he slurps), or perhaps the imperative form (Slurp!). For nouns it might be the third person singular form that is used when the noun functions as the subject of a sentence, as does the word alligator in the sentence Two alligators chased my cat away from the bank. In this case, the tape would go as follows: “Alligator. (Pause) Two alligators chased my cat away from the bank. (Pause) Alligator.” If finding the right form of the word to use in isolation gets confusing, then the LRP can simply use whatever form of the word occurs in the sentence. Note that there is no translation of the new vocabulary item (that is, of alligator). Having the full sentence with the new item in context will be enough to remind you of the meaning, and you will be reinforcing the item in your memory as a part of the new language, rather than as a translation of some English word.

In addition to the types of relatively predictable speech I've been discussing, there will be other sources of comprehensible input during Stage II. Conversational interaction, both with your LRP during language sessions, and with friends in general, will be a major source, so in the next section, when we talk about extemporaneous speaking in Stage II, we'll still be talking about comprehensible input. If you are learning a major world language you might consider watching a movie which has been dubbed from English into that language. First watch the movie in English. Then watch it in the other language. (I'm assuming you can rent the videos.) You may find that the speech in the movie becomes increasingly comprehensible with repeated viewings. (Movies with printed captions are a poor substitute.)

For some languages there may be commercially prepared tapes which were intended for Stage I language learners. In general, these are more appropriate as comprehensible input for Stage II language learners! When I was learning Urdu, I was given a tape with perhaps a hundred “useful expressions” that was intended to be memorized. Memorizing all of that would have eaten up a lot of the time I had available during Stage I for actually learning to comprehend, and to a lesser extent, to creatively speak, my new language. At Stage II it was easy to listen to the tape, understanding what I was hearing. At that point many of the forms of expression were easily absorbed and naturally used. For many languages there are a variety of commercially prepared tapes, either designed for travelers, or designed to accompany text books. You can use these as additional sources of comprehensible input during Stage II. It may be that the variety of language used in such tapes is overly formal, and not what is used for everyday purposes. Why not listen to such materials together with your LRP and discuss them (in the new language, of course)?