Building on the discussion on comprehensible input's (CI) constitutive elements, or the conceptual foundation, in Chapter 1, this chapter begins with a descriptive account of the history of CI. Included in this short overview are the origins of the concept dating back to the Gouin method (19th century) and Asher's Total Physical Response followed by its formal introduction to the field by Krashen in the Input Hypothesis in the 1980s. Next, in describing the conceptual foundation of CI, the chapter offers separate summaries for several linguistic, cognitive and socio-psychological frameworks. These accounts are presented from the perspectives of the cognitive load, automaticity, schema, dual-coding, multimodality, constructivism, socio-constructivism, poststructuralism and hybridity theories.

Laying the Groundwork: Origins and Historical Antecedents

The concept of CI is grounded in a long historical foundation, encompassing theory and research from numerous fields such as linguistics, L2A, educational psychology, cultural studies and English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching. Undoubtedly, a comprehensive examination of the use of the term would be incomplete without understanding its historical antecedents. It appears that CI's origins, some of its underlying assumptions, date back to the Gouin method (cited in Handschin, 1912), a practice-driven psychological approach to L2 teaching that presented grammatical and lexical units in ways that they would be easy for L2 learners to understand and remember. Gouin, a 19th-century individualist who owned a language school in Geneva, believed that L2s should be taught in similar ways to how first languages (L1) are taught. He developed this method with a focus on situational authenticity (Hanzeli, 1975). As part of the contemporary reform movement, his 'central concept was that the structure of language text reflected the structure of the experience it described' (Howatt & Widdowson, 2004: 180). More specifically, this method followed a simple sequential order of 'series' that included smaller chunks of language samples (e.g. short descriptions, commands) that were considered to constitute 'comprehensible units'.