Stephen Krashen: The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications

I feel like a dinosaur sometimes.  Other linguists and teachers talk about the "interactive hypothesis" and "communicative competence" and other relatively modern ideas about language acquisiton, and I think to myself, "humbug".  For all the backlash, and certain undeniable limitations, I feel like Krashen was right 30 years ago in asserting there really is only one cause for authentic language acquisiton: comprehensible input.

Now it's not that simple, of course.  There are matters of monitoring, and affective filters and the like, but there really is nothing that can compare to input when it comes to explaining successful language acquisition, both from a pedagogical and a cognitive standpoint.  This is not to say that one can just throw books at a student and step back, or that as a learner I can just read and read and hope to get better.  Too often, I will read something, encounter a new word, look it up in the dictionary and promptly forget it.  That input didn't get put in for some reason--to use more standard jargon, it didn't become intake.  The question that a believer in Krashen, such as I am, must ask is: what's the hangup?

Krashen often (here and elsewhere) identifies the necessary second element as a lowering of the affective filter, an openness to new information.  Others point to the necessity of attention, that one cannot simply receive input, one must also attend to it.  Neither of these explanations satisfy me.  In the specific case of seeing a new word, looking it up in the dictionary, and even then writing it down in an original sentence, the affective filter seems to be lowered, and attention is certainly being given. 

One might say then that the word is decontextualized, and therefore doesn't find a home in the cognitive matrix.  This is also unsatisfying.  I am surely not alone in learning a word or phrase for a specific, sometimes very necessary purpose, using it correctly in context, achieving my intended linguistic goal, and then promptly forgetting it.  For example, take the word 이발 (haircut).  In preparing to go to the barber, I looked the word up, remembered it, used it correctly, got my haircut, and then a month later had to repeat the same process again. And the following month.  And the following month. That linguistic item was highly contextualized, but somehow it did not beome intake.  It found no home in the syntactic matrix. 

Further complicating matters is the not infrequent occurrence of encountering a word once, and immediately acquiring it--even if it was completely decontextualized and unattended, and my affective filter was sealed tight.  For example, the word 호출 (pickup service).  I heard a taxi driver use it once passively, and have not forgotten it since--and this word is neither common nor particularly useful.  Or even more curiously, the word 바작 (a particular container used by farmers for collecting grass).  I read it in a poem once, looked it up, and have never forgotten it.  This word is so useless that native Korean speakers don't even know it exists.  If I try to use it, they tell me I'm mistaken, until they look it up in their Korean dictionary.  What elements are present in this type of experience that are absent when I purposefully try to learn a word, even making flash cards and trying to cram it awkwardly into conversation? 

As much as I agree with Krashen on every point, he comes up short in this department.  He is not wrong, for he doesn't really adresss it.  It's not a disagreement, just a deficiency in the Input Hypothesis, about which you can bet your lace panties I will continue to have something to say.