Using Comprehensible Input to Increase Your Language Learning

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

Comprehensible Input is a language acquisition strategy suggested by Stephen Krashen. Comprehensible Input is using what you can understand in the target language. This can be written or spoken. There are things a teacher can do to make the language more understandable to students. We are going to discuss some of these strategies.

First, the amount of language that is understood can be enhanced by hand gestures, pictures, diagrams, or other visual clues. For example, if the language passage you are working with is about an elephant, it would be helpful to have pictures of an elephant. Pictures are extremely useful when teaching new vocabulary.

Another strategy for helping students have better comprehension of a language passage is to activate prior knowledge. A class discussion on the general topic to find out what students already know and what areas they don’t know. This is a perfect time to teach new key vocabulary words as well.

Whole-class instruction is great for using these strategies since there is more than likely a wide range of language skills in the classroom. Students can learn from each other and work together to make a passage more comprehensible to all. This also gives the more confident students a chance to practice their language output while offering the rest of the…