Fillanzea Wrote:Actually, Stephen Krashen's "i+1" concept...
Correct. There are unfortuantely two meanings for "i+1" floating around, one is Krashen's "next structure" wrt his natural order hypothesis and the other is as a popular term meaning "what you know plus one thing you don't". The confusion is my fault for using the second while also talking about Krashen, which would otherwise imply the first. I actually changed Morph Man 3 to use "k+N" and "m+N" to attempt to replace that second usage, but it hasn't really caught on yet (no wonder, if even I forget to use it).
Either way, the point still stands that even if we assume** i+1 is naturally present in the sentences you plan on studying, you still need to limit yourself to comprehensible input. Krashen references Hatch's work, and points out the following characteristics to look for
Hatch Wrote:(1) slower rate and clearer articulation, which helps acquirers to identify word boundaries more easily, and allows more processing time;
(2) more use of high frequency vocabulary, less slang, fewer idioms;
(3) syntactic simplification, shorter sentences.
All of these are things you can sort sentences on. I'll also point out that #2 is simply a heuristic to avoiding sentences with too much new/unfamiliar vocabulary, which doesn't require more percisely monitoring vocab knowledge.
Morph Man employs #2, both the high frequency heuristic (based on frequency of morphemes within your Anki collection) and the more accurate, monitoring based, assessment of new/unfamiliar words (via k+N and m+N based on Anki card maturity) as well as #3 (it also avoids too short / trivial sentences as well). I don't know of any automated tools for sorting by #1, but that doesn't make it in any way less valid.
**: We should also consider this assumption may be false:
Krashen's Principles and Practice Wrote:As pointed out just a moment ago, comprehension is a necessary condition for language acquisition, but it is not sufficient. It is quite possible to understand input language, and yet not acquire. This can happen in several different ways: First, it is quite possible that the input simply does not contain i + 1, that it does not include structures that are "a bit beyond" the student. Second, in many cases we do not utilize syntax in understanding--we can often get the message with a combination of vocabulary, or lexical information, plus extralinguistic information. Finally, the "affective filter" may be "up", which can result in the acquirer understanding input, even input with i + 1, but not utilizing it for further acquisition.
The first case (presence of i+1) can be detected and is a viable filter (and thus sort), though I'm not aware of any automated tools for accurately tracking grammar knowledge. The second case can be achieved by choosing sentences more difficult than m+0 (but still comprehensible). The final case is not a filter in and of itself, but further backs the idea of focusing on "easy" sentences that don't cause too much of a struggle and trivial sentences that invoke boredom.
Continuing on that last case, it may be worth noting that whether a sentence is interesting, something most subs2srs advocaters would argue for, is "academically sound" as well. I'd highly suggest you tag/organize your sentences by topic so you can quickly switch between them according to mood.
Krashen Wrote:Experimental evidence suggests that students pay little or no attention to meaning after the first few repetitions in pattern drill (Lee, McCune, and Patton, 1970), and the same result is most likely true for dialogues that are memorized by rote.
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Some other fairly widespread input types that fall short of the mark of true relevance
are the reading assignments that most foreign language students work through in introductory courses. Generally, these selections bear very little resemblance to the kind of reading the students would do in their first language on their own time.
