My Anecdotal Observations about Comprehensible Input
By James F. Patterson
I’ve read and heard a fair amount about Comprehensible Input (hereafter CI), at least for a college teacher, but I can’t say with confidence I know what CI really is, and I doubt much (if anything) I do in the classroom counts as CI. And I’m fine with that. From what I understand, the principles of CI—at least as they are practiced today—are not suited for a classroom like mine, where we train students intensively in grammar with the aim of reading unadapted ancient texts.
Someone else can write the post on what CI is and why you might consider using it.
The point of this post is to outline some of the challenges college teachers may face when inheriting students who come from a CI or CI-adjacent classroom.
It is my perspective—correct or not, others will tell me—that students coming from the CI classroom have acquired a lexical foundation in Latin but not a grammatical—and certainly not a morphological—foundation. For instance, they may know what a good number of roots mean but not know how to account for, or translate, the grammatical construction, or even know what declension a given noun belongs to. As a result, a student may place into Intermediate Latin due to high school credits in the language but be unprepared for the course’s expectations.
For instance: relying on solely the lexical meaning of a word, a student may render a Latin sentence into a coherent English sentence that does not say what the Latin sentence says. At the college level, a standard approach when this happens is to ask the student to explain the grammar of the specific Latin words that have been mistranslated. If, for example, a student translates a verb passively, we might begin by asking the student for the verb’s voice. Likewise, if a student translates an ablative plural in –is (in a macron-free text) as if it were a genitive singular, we might ask them the declension of the noun.
Students from a CI background are not always able to answer these sorts of grammatical questions that we traditionally use to get them back on track in their translation. In extreme cases, students may not even be able to recognize why questions of declension or conjugation are meaningful in the first place.
This poses a real administrative challenge. If departments look solely at credit hours, they will place students into more advanced Latin courses than they are prepared for, when they really should be starting from scratch—as frustrating as this proposition might be for the student. This creates a situation in which we have, effectively, introductory-level students siting side-by-side with intermediate students, a class which itself already contains students at widely varying skill levels.
How to address this issue is the topic of another post. For now, it is worth knowing that this is a problem that exists, and if you think you observe dramatic disparities in student abilities, you might not be making it up.
For a general overview of Krashen’s original theory, see:
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~obilash/krashen.html
Some postscripts:
• Krashen developed his theory a long time ago. Like 40+ years ago. A lot in pedagogical theory has happened since.
• That aside, it’s not clear to me that proponents of Krashen are always applying his theories faithfully.
• Instruction in the target language should require an instructor fluent in the target language. I invite pushback on this point, but surely I won’t be an effective teacher of spoken Spanish if I can’t actually speak Spanish. Mutatis mutandis.
Classics Teaching 