Building up vocab with CI

Ironlady, I should probably pm you with this but I thought it might be of interest to other readers.

I understand how CI develops the ability to recognise and produce appropriate structures and functions in a language, but if the input is all known to the learner (in terms of vocabulary used) how does the learner acquire the long lists of vocab needed to actually use the language day to day?

The input isn’t all known; it’s all comprehensible. That means that when the learner is presented with a new word or structure, he is told immediately what it means. I wouldn’t consider that new item “known” (for a beginner, I mean) until it’s been circled a lot and the learner has encountered it probably 60-70 times in completely novel and unexpected contexts over a bit of time.

The acquisition of vocabulary at the higher levels (when the learner already has the major structures of the language acquired, but lacks the breadth of vocab) is going to involve a shift in strategy (IMO) to be most effective. This becomes more complicated lots of times since people also want to be literate in Chinese (no big surprise) and reading and writing take a looooong time and are not (for a “non-simple script” language) particularly CI-based IMO (thinking of CI as related to phonetic forms of the language, that you hear used, rather than the longer process of symbol to sound to meaning. And if we’re going straight from symbol to meaning, that would be something different, right? Gotta think about that one.)

Basically, I think what happens after the student has the ability to recognize and produce appropriate structures using the relatively small pool of vocab that he gains while getting the input that made that happen is that he can then use the fact that the structure is truly acquired to leverage the acquisition of new vocab. He can read. He can listen. Those activities should ideally be scaffolded and guided for the maximum effect in the minimum time, but he doesn’t need the exhaustive circling that TPRS teachers do with beginners.

I’ve blogged in more excruciating detail about this: albanylanguagelearning.com/blog/?p=94 since I think the question is a really good one, and something people don’t “get” about CI/TPRS teaching.

[quote=“ironlady”]The input isn’t all known; it’s all comprehensible. That means that when the learner is presented with a new word or structure, he is told immediately what it means. I wouldn’t consider that new item “known” (for a beginner, I mean) until it’s been circled a lot and the learner has encountered it probably 60-70 times in completely novel and unexpected contexts over a bit of time.

The acquisition of vocabulary at the higher levels (when the learner already has the major structures of the language acquired, but lacks the breadth of vocab) is going to involve a shift in strategy (IMO) to be most effective. This becomes more complicated lots of times since people also want to be literate in Chinese (no big surprise) and reading and writing take a looooong time and are not (for a “non-simple script” language) particularly CI-based IMO (thinking of CI as related to phonetic forms of the language, that you hear used, rather than the longer process of symbol to sound to meaning. And if we’re going straight from symbol to meaning, that would be something different, right? Gotta think about that one.)

Basically, I think what happens after the student has the ability to recognize and produce appropriate structures using the relatively small pool of vocab that he gains while getting the input that made that happen is that he can then use the fact that the structure is truly acquired to leverage the acquisition of new vocab. He can read. He can listen. Those activities should ideally be scaffolded and guided for the maximum effect in the minimum time, but he doesn’t need the exhaustive circling that TPRS teachers do with beginners.

I’ve blogged in more excruciating detail about this: albanylanguagelearning.com/blog/?p=94 since I think the question is a really good one, and something people don’t “get” about CI/TPRS teaching.[/quote]

Thanks. That’s really, really helpful. As a former English teacher it helps me to understand CI so much better. I would have taught appropriate level vocab alongside grammar, so that there would be tiers or hierarchies of vocab tied to grammatical structures. Of course this is simplistic and unnecessary. There’s no reason that a beginner can’t learn the word ‘falsehood’ as well as ‘lie’ if they want to. And then there are always the useless phrases that the poor students get taught for some kind of culturally imperialistic reason, e.g. ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’. I mean who on earth ever actually says that??? :loco:

I appreciate the refining of the meaning of the word ‘known’ in this context. It seems to me that CI eventually trains the learner to be able to comprehend and produce the language in a kind of whole overview (not expressing it very well), and that it’s a verbal rather than literary route into the new language, because verbal acquisition is our normal mode for learning languages. Once a certain level of acquisition is achieved, the learner’s vocabulary will expand naturally through usage of the language and perhaps self-directed learning through reading. Once the meaning of unfamiliar vocab is established, the deep understanding of the language’s structure should make anything else clear.

Haven’t read your blog yet but I’ll have a look later.

Right. I think what CI tries to do is produce (necessarily slightly modified and limited) native speakers. The result is not really a native speaker (they lack the broadness of exposure and the sheer number of hours) but CI-taught students do tend to have the “that doesn’t sound right” radar more strongly than rules-and-output taught students (who often hardly have it at all, and can only judge based on analysis of patterns, if at all.)

Thanks. I’ve read your blog now and I think I get it.

Sorry if you have answered this but I am a little unclear on one aspect. I think you said is important to first get a mastery on all the different grammar structures before trying to acquire a lot of vocabulary as the quickest road to fluency. But I have also heard you express that the way to acquire things through the CI method is to hear grammar patterns or vocab spoken many different times in as many different contexts as possible.

So what I am asking is how do manage to hear grammar patterns used in as many different contexts as possible in order to acquire them without having a large pool of vocab to allow the different contexts? This might just be a misunderstanding of what you have written, if so sorry for the confusion.

I was not particularly clear in expressing what I meant…

“Unexpected contexts” means that the repetitions of the vocabulary items are not predictable, that’s all. It generally should not involve the introduction of new vocabulary to form the new context or situation.

Most traditional textbooks offer single-sentence exercises focusing on a grammar point. For CI, we want to present vocabulary as meaning (and handle structure as meaning as well) but avoid predictability in the repetition. We believe that the cumulative effect of having utterances comprehended by the brain is what leads to acquisition, and that this will be stronger if it isn’t the same sentence being understood over and over. The brain needs to be able to generalize, and to do that it needs more than one exemplar.

Probably using the word “context” was not a good choice on my part. :frowning:

It appears a lot of people are interested in the concept of CI. But is there anyway we can see CI in use in a video? I’m interested to watch it in action rather than just reading the theory. Krashen’s lecture on it is great but his CI demo of German lasts for about 1 minute tops. Where can we see CI in action?

Speeves: Check Youtube. There’s tons of stuff on there (some more or less helpful than others).

MILLIONS of people say that.

[quote]Re: Typhoon 2009
by Icon on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 2:44
Well, at least tall plastic boots and Bushi shoes are still fashionable…

It is raining cats and dogs in Neihu. Not a drop here near the Main Station. [/quote]

[quote=“mauri”]thanks for that, i will have a look and hope that it does not have this problem.
it’s raining cats and dogs over here… [/quote]

[quote=“Lo Bo To”]Uhhhh…According to the U.S. Navy it wasn’t

npmoc.navy.mil/jtwc.html

But it is raining cats and dogs down here. :p[/quote]

Want more examples? :laughing:

MILLIONS of people say that.

[quote]Re: Typhoon 2009
by Icon on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 2:44
Well, at least tall plastic boots and Bushi shoes are still fashionable…

It is raining cats and dogs in Neihu. Not a drop here near the Main Station. [/quote]

[quote=“mauri”]thanks for that, i will have a look and hope that it does not have this problem.
it’s raining cats and dogs over here… [/quote]

[quote=“Lo Bo To”]Uhhhh…According to the U.S. Navy it wasn’t

npmoc.navy.mil/jtwc.html

But it is raining cats and dogs down here. :p[/quote]

Want more examples? :laughing:[/quote]

Damn you! :raspberry:

I have checked youtube for CI Chinese and TPRS Chinese but come up with nothing. Can someone tell me what to search for specifically?

Oh. You can find CI and TPRS stuff for English and other languages. You could copy what they do, but use it for Chinese.

For instance:

This is from Automatic Language Growth (which is CI taken to an extreme of not speaking for several hundred hours of instruction). There is a second part too.

To be honest, I think it can be hard to follow if you haven’t read up on it (especially if you don’t know what the ALG mob are on about). There’s tons of stuff in Spanish and there’s also tons of TPR stuff. The TPR stuff is really easy to follow/implement.

TPR, though, is limited in its power to help people acquire language because of the need for the concepts discussed to be concrete (or having a piece of paper or a ball represent “freedom” or “courage” which to me is a little weird. “Put the courage on your head” is not the language we should be teaching, to my mind.)

You need to be careful in taking things (especially YouTube videos) to be TPRS. There are lots of people out there who think they do TPRS but don’t. Be especially careful of Spanish stuff since it’s so widespread that over-enthusiastic people self promote. Ben Slavic (on the YouTube video above) is a good practitioner of “the real thing”. There will be videos of me demo-ing TPRS used to teach Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii from this past March on the Confucius Center web site, but they apparently haven’t finished the video editing yet. It wasn’t an awful demo but not 100% perfect either (but I’ll be happy to list what was bad about it.) :wink:

If you have TPRS-specific questions, you can always visit the Yahoo groups group at groups.yahoo.com/group/moreTPRS as everyone there is very happy to answer questions, and the group is frequented by virtually all of the “heavy hitters” in the TPRS training community: Blaine Ray, Susie Gross, Carol Gaab, Rochelle Barry, Scott Benedict, Kristy Placido, Carmen Andrews, and so on. All of whom would be good examples of TPRS done well.

ironlady: Regarding TPR, of course. I find it good for kids (the younger the better) for two reasons though. The first is that they tend to be much more concrete anyway. The second is that some of them have energy to burn, and then some, so it’s more engaging for them.

I really want to learn more about TPRS, but I just don’t have anywhere near the competence to pull that off in the classroom yet.

Oh, I’m not saying TPR has no value. I’m just saying that eventually you hit something like a glass ceiling, and run out of concrete actions to TPR (or destroy much of the furniture in the classroom. :wink: )

And younger learners are very concrete. Even if you’re doing TPRS with them, you have to be careful that the stories are not too fantastic or unexpected, and EVERY kid has to have a turn, or there will be Rioting.

Please post links to that when they’re up. And, whatever happened to that video you told us about in KHH about the TPRS lesson on just “好不好”? I’d still love to see that.

Just got the e-mail today: I’ll be demoing Hawaiian-by-TPRS at the ROC ETA convention in Taipei in October. It’s an hour or an hour and a half (don’t remember exactly) so it will be a demo plus a “debriefing” with a chance for people to ask questions. It won’t teach you how to do it but you can get an idea for what’s possible using it. (Probably will not be doing the part where I make people read Hawaiian using made-up ideographic characters…somewhat eye-opening about reading characters, but intended more for Chinese teachers than English teachers.)

I will probably submit to a Chinese-language teaching conference in Tainan around then as well, not quite sure of the scheduling yet (or whether I will finish the paper in time…) :frowning:

Of course.

I’ve had adult classes like that. If there’s a CEO or principal present, that person gets to have at least three turns or there will be rioting.

I’d be interested to hear/read about a student’s perspective of CI or the similar methods mentioned here. Anyone know where I could find something like that?