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I was perusing Reddit's r/languagelearning, and this comment by u/whosdamike piqued my curiosity (especially the parts I highlighted in bold):

Here is an update I made about learning Thai via pure comprehensible input. I use learner-aimed videos that gradually ramp up in difficulty. Beginner videos used visual aids to communicate meaning alongside the spoken speech; these visual aids mostly dropped by the lower intermediate level.

At the beginning, 100% of my understanding was coming from pictures/drawings/gestures/facial expressions. Now almost all my understanding comes from the spoken speech and explanations for new words are almost entirely explained in Thai.

This caught me by surprise, because obviously explanations in one's target language should count as comprehensible input. But then...

Question: What input doesn't count as "comprehensible input"?

If explanations count as "comprehensible input", then when a teacher teaches vocabulary and grammar (assuming they're using the target language when teaching), that input is comprehensible too. It seems studying textbooks, example sentences, and looking up words in a dictionary are also ways to get input that is comprehensible. Besides output, I'm struggling to conceive of plausible language-learning activities which would not be considered comprehensible input.

Perhaps "comprehensible input" simply means "input which is not incomprehensible", but that doesn't seem like particularly profound. There must be more to this story.

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    I think Krashen was talking about featuring content-based instruction in the classroom as opposed to skill-building activities in the classroom (e.g. fill out this verb conjugation table). However, in Internet circles CI seems to have become some kind of meme and its non-academic meaning varies based on who is using that term, ranging from "binge-watching Netflix" to "listen to people talking very slowly" to "just read, read, read" to "avoid all translation like the plague". Commented Apr 16, 2024 at 14:45

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Comprehensible input is input you comprehend. Typically they exclude stuff you comprehend because you were given a translation to your native language, but any other means is fair game - context, pictures, gestures, etc.

Keep in mind that comprehensible input is part of almost all language learning approaches. If you're doing Duolingo and you hit a radio lesson or story lesson, that's comprehensible input. The bits where you were practicing translation over and over weren't, but the radio or story lesson is. If you're doing the Genki textbook and reading the accompanying readers, the readers are comprehensible input, the textbook isn't.

A lot of people confuse comprehensible input with automatic language growth (ALG), an educational approach where you use only comprehensible input and nothing else. But comprehensible input isn't exclusive to ALG, it's used in the vast majority of language learning approaches. ALG is unique in not using other methods alongside comprehensible input.

But in short, there are two kinds of input that don't count as comprehensible input - input you don't understand, and input you only understand with the help of translation.

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