Just how do you prompt a student?

I'm a big fan of the courses recorded by Michel Thomas before his death, and I'm always happy to say so.  The biggest complaint I hear about the Thomas courses are that they "teach you to translate".  The argument goes that because the students are only ever prompted with their native language (English) then they never learn to "think in" their target language.  This bold assertion lacks any substantial evidence.  I would argue that translation is one of the best methods of prompting a student, and that avoiding it actually delays proficiency.

Last year I wrote a post entitled Translation: an unjustified scapegoat, in which I pointed out that translation is very very often blamed for errors that do not arise from native-language interference, and therefore cannot be translation errors.  What I neglected to say is that this is a real demotivator for learners.  To be told categorically that they're translating, when they don't really believe they are translating, and to be told to do something else without any instructions on how to do it... well, the teacher is essentially blaming the student.  That's not teaching, sorry.

Anyway, that's not the main point of this article, so time to put the train of thought back on the rails.

I am in favour of translation for three main reasons:

1: Translation allows simultaneous focus on meaning and form

If you perform a language class in the target language only, it is all too common for the answer to be mechanically reproducible from the question, without any real need to understand the meaning of either.

eg Do you have a flargrard? - No, I don't have a flargrard.

I've no idea what a "flargrard" is, so it's a reasonable bet I don't have one. (Note to non-native English-speaking readers: the word "flargrard" doesn't exist -- I made it up for this example.)

It gets worse if you include substitution drills:

eg
House: I have a house - I have a house
Cat - I have a cat.
Dog - I have a dog.
Flargrard - I have a flargrard

Translation, on the other hand, gives the student a prompt that can be understood unambiguously.  The student cannot fail to understand the full meaning of the sentence, a meaning which will therefore be instrinsically linked to the target sentence.

2: The so-called "form focus" of many monolingual tasks is really no such thing.

If the task can be done mechanically, as in the "answer in questions" example above, or the substitution drill, then you never have to select the appropriate form.  You never have to recall it from memory.  If you don't have to recall it from memory, you cannot learn to recall it from memory.

In fact, it is pretty much impossible to devise a monolingual language task that will elicit the required grammar point/structure spontaneously.  You either supply them with the structure, or you end up involved in a metalinguistic discussion that leads to one or two of the class recalling the "rule", and if we end up talking about rules, we're not connecting with spontaneous language.

3: Target-language-only normally fails to be "naturalistic".

I've discussed the issues of expository vs naturalistic language before, and in this case, I'll refer you back to the question Do you have a flargrard?  The natural response is to say simply "No," or "No, I don't," but we're generally forced to answer in (unnatural) sentences in the monolingual classroom: "No, I don't have a flargrard."  I don't know about you, but I don't like "answering in sentences" -- my brain knows it's wrong and unnecessary.  I don't like telling students off for not answering in sentences because I see this as evidence that they're actually involved in language, rather than just juggling words.


So target-language-only is potentially devoid of practice of both meaning and form, which I'd say is a pretty big problem for language learning!


Is translation the panacea then?

Well, no, because it certainly has its pitfalls.

For example, if I ask you to translate "a brown bear", am I asking you to say "a bear of colour brown" or "a bear of the species brown bear, also known as grizzly"?  And even if both translate to the same thing in the target language, there's a point of assymetry when we hit "white bear", which is not ambiguous.  Prompts for translation must be very carefully selected, then.

This limits how far we can learn a language by translation, obviously.  We cannot learn every noun and idiom by direct translation, but we don't need to -- the trick is to use translation where it's (1) obvious and easy or (2) where conscious awareness of the difference helps overcome a specific difficulty.

(1) The "obvious and easy" would include my favourite example: conditional sentences in English vs Romance languages, which translate pretty much directly -- eg  "If I was/were you, I would...", "If I'd known you were coming I'd have baked a cake" etc.  This is "advanced" material in traditional classes, but translation makes it trivially easy (to the point where Michel Thomas would be teaching it on the second or third day of his courses).

(2) An example of a specific difficulty is the difference in idiom between "to be" an age in English and "to have" an age in the Romance languages.  Not a difficult rule, but even after loooots of practice, you'll often here a learner make the mistake one way or the other.  So the practice method the teacher uses gets the student to produce the desired answer, but it doesn't build any resistance to native-language interference, so in an uncontrolled setting the original error returns.  (And the teacher blames the student for translating, and the student is confused and disheartened etc.)

One of the biggest visible benefits of translation though, is simple:

Speed, volume and throughput of practice

Because translation starts with a readily-understood prompt, you don't have to waste too much time thinking about what the prompt means or what you're being asked to do.  This means you can get through a lot more questions.  A translation-based lesson that manages to present no more questions than a target-language-only lesson is a wasted opportunity.

In an attempt to teach myself Corsican, I've written a little program that conjugates, combines and declines words and presents them to me as translation tasks, checks my answers and tells me if I got them right or wrong.  I can batter through hundreds of examples in very little time.  Kind of exhausting, yes, but pretty effective.  A couple of hours using it, spread over a couple of weeks, has hammered in some of the basics pretty solidly.

But...

Translation's biggest problem

Once you start whipping through the questions at speed, you really do start to work on autopilot, and you start to see patterns emerging in your errors.  And I noticed one specific type of mistake that I made frequently that I hadn't been too aware of before... I kept switching my "I" and my "you".

It makes perfect sense, now that I think about it, and I probably did it a lot with MT, even though I didn't pay it any mind at the time.  And heck, I've even heard the same thing from some of my students when I've asked them to translate short sentences.

Because when the computer says to me "you know it", that "you" refers to me.  It's "eio", "io", "je", "yo", "ich" or whatever.  That's what it means.  Literal direct translation is therefore something of a higher-order function, an abstraction.

And yet it seems to be quite effective.  So what do we do?

Well, personally I'll be attempting to stay away from first and second-person references as much as possible.  I'll be sticking to the minimum required to learn them individually as grammar points, but when the person is included only as part of the context for a sentence testing another grammar point, I'll favour "he/she/it/they" over "I/we/you".

But I'll certainly be paying more attention to what exactly happens when we translate.  I still think it's one of the best tools the learner has, but we've just got to work to eliminate the ambiguities....

Dialogues from Day One.

I discussed dialogues briefly in an earlier post on expository and naturalistic language.  Fasulye suggested in the comment section that dialogues didn't necessarily lead to the use on unnaturalistic language.  OK, so I didn't say that it did -- the point I raised was that dialogues aren't a "magic bullet" that makes all language seem naturalistic.

However, that said, I'm not a big fan on dialogues anyway, so today I'm going to talk about how starting a course with dialogues from the very first lesson actually slows down progress for the learner.

My contention:
The need for a coherent dialogue forces the author to use language that the student isn't yet ready to understand.
The dialogue format forces the learner to move between such a variety of different language, that it forces the student to attempt to learn too many things at once.

I'll use as my example one of the ever-popular Teach Yourself books.

Lesson 1 TY Welsh opens with the following dialogue (my translation)
Matthew: Good morning.
Elen: Good morning. Who are you?
Matthew: I'm Matthew.
Elen: How's things? I'm Elen, the Welsh course tutor.
Matthew: I'm a learner, a very nervous learner!
Elen: Welcome to Lampeter, Matthew. Don't be nervous, everything will be fine.

What do we start off with?  It's those old favourites -- hello, what's your name etc.

But what does this teach us?

Let's have a look at the Welsh for "who are you" and "I'm Matthew":  "Pwy dych chi?" and "Matthew ydw i".

These two phrases are completely alien to the English speaker.  There is only one clue that the English speaker can use to try to make sense of this -- the name "Matthew".  A learner might assume that "pwy" and "ydw" are linked, but they're not -- "dych" goes with "ydw", even though the two are not visibly related.

This is the verb "to be", and this problem isn't unique to Welsh -- consider the English "are", "am" and "is".  So even when we look at dialogues from an entirely expository point of view, we have a problem that means we have too many unknowns for the new learner.

Consider the following (not a real example) as though it was in lesson one:
John: Are you tired?
Sally: Yes, I am tired.

You as a learner are asked to contrast the question with the answer, but we have a massive amount of variation in a very simple sentence.  First of all, we have the matter of the irregular verb forms, as above.  Secondly, the pronouns are radically different (as in most languages).  Finally, we have a change of word order.  Learners could confuse their verbs and pronouns, and miss the word order entirely.

OK, that's not a real lesson 1 example, but I've already given a worse example from the Welsh course - Pwy dych chi?.  In the Welsh, the word order doesn't change for the answer Matthew ydw i, but that's arguably as difficult for an English speaker as English word order is for speakers of a language that doesn't change order.  We also have no repeated recognisable word form to highlight any the word order in Welsh.  There is an awful lot of rules in play here, each interacting to make the full meaning of the sentence.  Without seeing these in isolation, the role of individual elements is obscured.

And it's even more complicated in French.  Many courses will introduce Comment t'appelles tu? and the response Je m'appelle Jean-Pierre (or whatever name).  This introduces the complication of the reflexive pronoun, which is a version of the object pronoun.  Well, actually, the reflexive pronoun is identical to the normal object pronoun for "me" and "you", which actually makes this more confusing.  While the change of word order for the question is theoretically the same as English, the lack of auxiliary do (eg Do you know?) in French questions makes it completely different to the untrained eye.  The fact that this places the object before the subject is particularly alien to the English speaker.  This is massively difficult, and so the learner is only expected to memorise or learn to recognise the phrase.  The assumption here is that by exposure to later examples, the learner will induce the underlying patterns, but this is something that dialogues are actually very bad at.

Dialogues by their nature attempt to model naturalistic conversations, and this leads them to include a very wide variety of language.  Unfortunately, variety means very little repetition, so there is very little material to induce the rules from.  It gets worse when the writer is trying particularly hard to be naturalistic, because many of the expository cues are lost.  Remember this from earlier?  I'm a learner, a very nervous learner!  Notice that this uses elision (the ommission of repeated words) for increase naturalisticness, but missing the opportunity to reinforce the structure "I am".

French courses rarely follow up the je m'appelle with any other reflexive constructions -- the only thing it is contrasted with is usually il/elle s'appelle (he/she/it is called).  The student is left knowing the phrase for a long time without being given the input to learn why it means what it means.  In fact, this risks interfering with normal (non-reflexive) object pronouns, because the learner is overexposed to the reflexive form, and unexposed to the base form for a long time.

The root cause of the problem

The language in a naturalistic dialogue is linked by context, and elision is a major feature of natural language.
In short, we actively avoid repeating language in a conversation.

This leaves us teaching language that is only bound by context, so is semantically reinforcing, but not syntactically reinforcing.

If we progress in a language by learning a new word, it opens up a few extra possibilities, but learning new grammatical structures can double our knowledge of the language.

So imagine you know "I like...", "I have..." and "cars", "trees" and "dogs" -- you can say 6 combinations.  If you next learn to say "cats", that's an additional two sentences -- "I like cats" and "I have cats" -- so 8 in total.

But if instead you learn the negation "don't", that doubles the number of sentences to 12.

Massive growth in beginner language is only possible if you focus on teaching language points that can be combined within a sentence to make bigger and more complicated sentences.  The dialogue format militates against this, and after one dialogue-based lesson, a learner is not likely to be able to produce even as much as is in the dialogues themselves.  Compare with the Michel Thomas courses where (even excluding the -ible/-able words) the learner has a range of expression that while limited still covers dozens of different possible sentences.  By building on this, the student experiences almost exponential growth.  That's cool.

Expository vs Naturalistic Language Examples

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing authentic materials.  The main problem I identified was the lack of mutual reinforcement between individual texts (I hate that word, but I just can't find a suitable alternative...) meaning that very little language presented is retained.

So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?

Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox.  Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts.  If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals.  The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.

The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour.  Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.

But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea.  In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.

But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?

The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.

There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.

To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".

Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach.  The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.

I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.

He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"

And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."

There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise.  We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.

I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.

An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago.  I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back.  The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition.  So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.

The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]

This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples.  Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural.  Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article.  "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets.  But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?"  The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal.  We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").

The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable."  Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar.  This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.

And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel.  When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response.  This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.

"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice.  Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap.  The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do.  The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong.  The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that."  Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you.  This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us).  The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost.  Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears.  Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses.  If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.

OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.

One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube.  He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language.  He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ.  Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out.  His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.

But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material?  Hmm....

Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ.  My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."

The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.

And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.

So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against.  The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.

One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue.  Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts.  Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog.  Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues.  Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.

The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language.  This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen.  I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen.  It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.

Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this?  Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability.  Except that Bernard is not a boy.  The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed.  Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there.  Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)

Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard.  Maybe they're introducing themselves to us?  Like a "piece to camera" in a video course?  It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna.  But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives.  Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)

Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!

This odd dynamic continues throughout the book.  The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains.  From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it.  Who exactly are they presenting information to?  They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,

So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet.  Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful.  Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.

But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen.  Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules.  One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible".  But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic.  Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible".  "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go.  Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:

If you think about it, what did he start with?

He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy.  Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input".  But it was not comprehensible.  Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.

So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language.  But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language.  The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.

In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem.  But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better.  It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation.  And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc.  These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course.  In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*

Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration.  Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept.  Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate.  Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language.  When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious.  If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".

So Jespersen is mostly wrong.  Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.