1.1 – Making Input – – Comprehensible.

No one comes into this world with the ability to understand everything that is happening around them.  As infants, we arrive with screams and crying as our strategies for not only making our presence known, but as strategies for communicating.  Over time, the repetition of sights and sounds around us scaffold our literacy skills, and we begin to develop the ability to speak.  While seemingly magical, the combination of sensory inputs make it possible for us to comprehend and to learn.  The adults around us knew this, and used a variety of strategies, both consciously and unconsciously, to provide comprehensible input that was meaningful and relevant. 

Comprehensible Input is a major focus of this course.  You may already know this concept, but as a group of learners, we each bring our own unique background knowledge to any setting.  The following infographic from the TELL Project (Links to an external site.) offers an overview of this concept.  Take a moment to review this infographic and consider how it relates to what you already know about comprehensible input: Using the Target Language and Providing Comprehensible Input (Links to an external site.)

We strongly suggest that you download and maintain a copy of this infographic for future reference. 

Let’s get started

We’ll begin our learning experience with a whole course discussion for sharing our individual understandings of comprehensible input.  To join the discussion, click on the following link or use the Navigation tab (Top left) to access the Discussion “What I know about Comprehensible Input.”‘

     What I Know About Comprehensible Input

To Continue

When you finish the posting via the link above, you can continue to the next section, 1.2 – Using the Target Language and Providing Comprehensible Input.Image Source: Ooi, P. (2015, March 15). Qairin Qusyairi Ooi [Digital image]. Retrieved June 7, 2016, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/phalinn/8592840672