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Thoughts on i + 1: The “Just a Little Bit” Hypothesis
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9 thoughts on “Thoughts on i + 1: The “Just a Little Bit” Hypothesis”
Here’s something that might also help that student who is frustrated with a feeling of always translating: i minus 1. “In order to develop skill in automatic word access, Hulstijn (2001) recommends listening to “i minus 1 level” texts. In contrast to Krashen’s principle of i plus 1 (Krashen, 1985), this activity requires learners to listen to oral texts that they are able to understand almost completely the first time with relatively little effort. As suggested by Hulstijn, this can be very motivating for L2 learners, especially when the texts are new to learners, relate to their interests and life experience, and are humorous. A variation of this activity requires listeners to follow along with a transcript of the text (fully grammatical, with no unfamiliar words) that has been slightly altered by the addition, deletion, and/or modification of some words. Listeners are forced to pay close attention to every word in order to identify slight discrepancies between the aural and the written form of the text. In that sense, the variation of the activity is more useful for making the sound-form connections since listeners must consciously use bottom-up processing in order to detect any discrepancies.” From Vandergrift and Goh, 2012. “Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening,” page 161.
This is an issue I would definitely like to clarify for myself. The i+1 and pushing of the conscious mind seems to go against my (inadequate) understanding of CI and the unconscious nature of language acquisition. Perhaps it’s just a matter of degree, and in most of our classes, whenever we use too many new words and go out of bounds, we closer to i+10, which causes them to shut down. But it interesting to hear this experienced teacher say that she WANTS students to translate in their heads, and that even a minimal level of new words will force the brain to shift to conscious analytical processing, but only to the degree that the text is still comprehensible.
It really is a mystery, isn’t it?
I didn’t know what the word “idiosyncratic” meant until I was in graduate school. I finally knew enough of everything else in my readings for classes that I was able to focus on that word. Only after looking it up in the dictionary and being very analytical/conscious-mind about it did I finally get it. Now I can say I have acquired it. But I did have to do some conscious thinking first.
I dunno when it past from one shade of grey to the other, from conscious to unconscious. Maybe when I started noticing humorously how idiosyncratic my professors were.
The way I get it is that we establish meaning in this way:
1. We tell them what a word or word chunk (one that is going to appear in speech or in a reading later in the class) means. That’s in English. Totally conscious.
2. We gesture it (TPR). That’s in body language. So not totally unconscious. Kind of unconscious. Very unconscious.
3. We PQA it. We say it so that the conscious mind (they know what it means in English) starts to let go of the need to be in control as we mount a blitzkrieg of questions, and each one of those questions has that word or word chunk in it. The more questions we ask in the PQA, the more the structure becomes unconscious. When it is unconscious, we are aligning with Krashen’s statement:
…language is acquired through comprehensible input. It is an unconscious process that happens when the learner is focused on the message, rather than the language itself….
After the PQA we can do a story or any other form of auditory CI we want, or we can do a reading.
What has happened? We have taken something that they didn’t know consciously, and we made them consciously aware of it, and then we hammered it out of conscious awareness into unconscious awareness, since that is where languages are acquired (where the student focuses on the meaning), NOT in the conscious mind (where the student focuses on the individual words, which brings zero gains).
I have been thinking about what I said in the original article above that 3 of 15 words in any CI should be new at the very most. That’s 20% of new input being new. I don’t mean that. Rather, I should have said that around 1 of every 15 words should be new. Maybe 5% to 7 % of words should be new. Just wanted to clarify. If we lose contact with our classes, it is highly likely that it is because we are throwing around over 5% to 7% of new vocabulary (thus going grossly out of bounds).
Now, if you are having trouble with your classes in terms of classroom management right now, it may be (I think it IS) due to the fact that you didn’t establish enough meaning on the basic vocabulary of the language you teach in the late summer and early fall. I think this applies to level 2 classes as well as level 1 classes, but I’m not sure about that.
So next year you may want to consider doing some of the Questionnaires a bit more, for some months in fact, if you resonate with that twin sister of CWB.
Both, along with OWI and WCTA, accomplish three key things to start they year:
1. set the rules in place (what I call “norming the class”).
2. get to know the kids in a real way (personalization).
3. give students a strong vocabulary base so that when you start stories you don’t have to allow any English.”
I should change the rule on the Classroom Rules poster from “avoiding English” to “no English”. I’ve had a seven or eight year flirtation with allowing my students two words of English to suggest cute answers, but now I think that I’ve finally gone full circle on that point and am ready now to embrace what Blaine has suggested all along, that we need to stay pretty much fully in the target language and not allow those two words. How can we do that? Just do enough vocabulary building with Circling with Balls or the use of the Questionnaire along with OWI and WCTA before stories. Voila! No need for English when you do stories. They have a built in strong vocabulary BEFORE you start stories. Then, in stories, you will only occasionally go out of bounds with Point and Pause (we all will go out of bounds) but you won’t go out of bounds all the time, which really wrecks CI classes.
Ben, your description here of the process of conscious—->unconscious is really really really good.
…because I’ve seen it happen in the eyes of my students. They start off looking at the English on the board but after 20 reps are just looking at me.
language is acquired through comprehensible input. It is an unconscious process that happens when the learner is focused on the message, rather than the language itself….
I sometimes think of the +1 as a clandestine passenger. There are some things, often involving very complex grammar, that the conscious mind doesn’t ever pick up on. But when we are focusing on the message and hearing the structure without really registering it (because we ARE focusing on the message) it eventually is acquired. This is how I personally acquired the subjunctive in French. I was introduced to it in school but told not to worry about it, and the rules were certainly complex enough that I had no desire for a closer acquaintance. I remember going into an important exam at the university of Bordeaux and suddenly realizing that I might need it for my translation from English to French. I asked the girl sitting next to me, a French native, for a quick summary of when to use it. She blithely told me that she avoided it like the plague and gave me a list of equivalents that did not require the subjunctive.
Yet I do use the subjunctive when I speak. “Il faut que j’aille…, quoi qu’il fasse, où qu’il soit, etc. Simply because my brain has heard certain expressions so often that it automatically serves them up when needed. I sometimes get corrected for not using it, but this generally ends up in a heated discussion between two native speakers about whether or not it’s necessary.
Correct grammar is properly spoken language. No need to know all the uses of the subjunctive (although I took great pleasure in memorizing all of them bc I am a sick individual). If it sounds right, it’s right. How’s that for a grammar rule?
So sad that some kids learned all the grammar rules but never heard the language. Why go to all that trouble, watching class enrollments drop off the cliff each year to where some teachers have but ten or less kids left in level 4, and they don’t even want to be there, when you could have them learn the grammar by the “it just sounds right” rule.