In many of my posts I have lamented the lack of comprehensible input for language learners, whether it be in the form of classes or other resources. In my last post , I observed that while academics today generally agree that comprehensible input is very important to language acquisition, more comprehensible input exists today mainly by accidentβbecause technology has made so much foreign language media easily available.
However most of this media, like TV shows and movies, is aimed at native speakers and so is not very comprehensible for beginners to efficiently pick up language from. In this post I want to take a more positive focus and highlight some work that people have been doing to create this kind of input.
A number of former students of the AUA Thai Program have gone on to create their own resources to provide comprehensible input in various languages and post them online so that anyone can access for free from anywhere at any time.
This content reflects the Automatic Language Growth ALG approach used by the AUA Thai Program in that it uses non-verbal tools like gestures and drawings to make the language understandable so that even beginners can pick up language without study.
For some of the languages these former AUA Thai students are creating comprehensible input in, this kind of material has perhaps never before been deliberately made. While many of the videos feature two Khmer teachers from LINK and are entirely in Khmer, some videos that have one teacher and one foreigner use Crosstalk , an ALG technique where each person speaks their own language. Andrej studied Thai using an approach based on listening and comprehensible input that included attending AUA classes and watching many hours of video and other content in Thai.
