# Comprehensible Input (Krashen i+1), Sentence Mining, Collocations & CEFR B1–B2 Fluency

> 32 review cards on Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis (i+1), lexical coverage thresholds (95% vs. 98%), 1T sentence mining, corpus collocations and Sinclair's Idiom Principle, Nation's Four Strands, and CEFR B1–B2 fluency descriptors.

- **Canonical URL:** https://flashcards.world/flashcards/sets/e6830ec3-713c-4761-a93a-2a8b7bd6918b/
- **Markdown URL:** https://flashcards.world/flashcards/sets/e6830ec3-713c-4761-a93a-2a8b7bd6918b.md
- **Level:** intermediate
- **Languages:** en → en
- **Total Cards:** 32

## Flashcards (32 Cards)

| # | Front (Term / Prompt) | Back (Definition / Answer) | Example | Multiple-Choice Options |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | How do corpus linguists measure collocational strength using 'Mutual Information (MI)' versus 't-score'? | 'Mutual Information (MI)' measures the strength of association between two words relative to chance (highlighting strongly bound, lower-frequency pairs like 'torrential rain'), whereas 't-score' weights co-occurrence by absolute corpus frequency (highlighting high-frequency core collocations like 'make sure'). |  |  |
| 2 | Why are '2T+ (multi-unknown)' sentences inefficient for spaced-repetition flashcards compared to '1T (i+1)' sentences? | Sentences with multiple unknown elements overload working memory, obscure contextual cues needed to infer the target meaning, increase review latency, and violate the minimum-information principle by testing multiple unacquired items at once. |  |  |
| 3 | What is 'Narrow Reading and Narrow Listening' (Krashen), and why does it accelerate intermediate sentence mining? | Consuming multiple texts or episodes by the same author, speaker, or within a single domain naturally recycles core domain vocabulary, collocations, and stylistic structures, rapidly pushing lexical coverage above 98%. |  |  |
| 4 | How do 'Shadowing' (Alexander Arguelles) and the '4/3/2 Fluency Technique' (Paul Nation) build automaticity at B1–B2? | 'Shadowing' (repeating native audio aloud with a ~0.5-second lag matching rhythm, intonation, and articulation) automatizes phonological motor loops; the '4/3/2 technique' (delivering the same spoken summary to three partners in 4 minutes, then 3 minutes, then 2 minutes) increases speech rate, mean length of run, and grammatical accuracy. |  |  |
| 5 | What is the role of native 'Audio Sentence Cards' and 'Subs2SRS' media extraction in training listening comprehension? | Pairing the exact native audio clip from a film, series, or podcast with the mined sentence trains bottom-up phonological decoding of connected speech (assimilation, elision, liaison, reduced vowels, and natural prosody) rather than idealized citation forms. |  |  |
| 6 | What are 'Support-Verb Constructions (Delexicalized / Light Verbs)', and why are they a major source of L1 interference at B1–B2? | Light verbs (such as English 'make, take, do, have, give', French 'faire/prendre', German 'Funktionsverbgefüge') carry little independent lexical meaning and rely on the noun for semantic content; because each language assigns different light verbs to the same noun (e.g., 'take a photo' vs. Spanish 'sacar una foto'), learners must memorize the whole Verb + Noun chunk. |  |  |
| 7 | What is Stephen Krashen's 'Input Hypothesis (i+1)' in second language acquisition (SLA)? | Learners acquire language subconsciously when exposed to 'comprehensible input' containing structures slightly beyond their current competence level ('i+1'), where 'i' represents already acquired competence and context, extralinguistic cues, and prior knowledge bridge the gap to '+1'. |  |  |
| 8 | What lexical coverage percentages did Paul Nation and Norbert Schmitt establish for adequate vs. optimal unassisted reading comprehension? | Roughly '95% lexical coverage' (1 unknown word in 20) is the minimum threshold for basic assisted comprehension, whereas '98% lexical coverage' (1 unknown word in 50) is required for pleasurable, unassisted extensive reading and reliable incidental vocabulary inference from context. |  |  |
| 9 | Compare 'Sentence Recognition Cards' (Target Sentence on Front) with 'Contextual Cloze Deletion Cards' in sentence mining. | 'Sentence recognition cards' place the intact target sentence on the front to test reading/listening comprehension and target-word meaning in context, whereas 'contextual cloze cards' blank out the target collocation or inflected form (with a brief cue) to train active lexical-grammatical production. |  |  |
| 10 | Why does sentence mining outperform isolated bilingual word-pair flashcards ('L2 word -> L1 translation') at CEFR B1–B2? | Isolated word pairs encourage false 1-to-1 lexical translation equivalents and strip away valency, prepositional government, register, and collocational constraints, whereas mined sentences encode the word's exact syntactic frame and semantic prosody. |  |  |
| 11 | What are Paul Nation's 'Four Strands' of a balanced language curriculum, and how should study time be distributed across them? | Study time should be split equally (~25% each) across: 1) 'Meaning-focused input' (extensive reading/listening at 98% coverage), 2) 'Meaning-focused output' (speaking/writing), 3) 'Language-focused learning' (deliberate SRS sentence mining, collocations, pronunciation, grammar), and 4) 'Fluency development' (speed training with 100% familiar material). |  |  |
| 12 | What causes the 'B1–B2 Intermediate Plateau', and what concrete strategies overcome it? | The plateau occurs when high-frequency survival vocabulary (~2,000 words) suffices for basic communication, reducing natural noticing of mid-frequency vocabulary, collocations, and complex syntax; overcoming it requires shifting to authentic unsimplified native media, mining '1T (i+1)' collocation/sentence cards, and eliciting corrective feedback on pushed output. |  |  |
| 13 | What is 'Sentence Mining' in spaced-repetition language learning, and what defines an ideal '1T (One-Target) / i+1' sentence? | Sentence mining is extracting authentic sentences from native media (books, podcasts, films) into SRS flashcards; an ideal '1T (i+1)' sentence contains exactly ONE unknown target word, collocation, or grammatical structure while every other word in the sentence is already known. |  |  |
| 14 | What are the three core dimensions of oral proficiency in the 'CAF Framework (Complexity, Accuracy, Fluency)' (Skehan & Ellis)? | 'Complexity' measures syntactic subordination and lexical sophistication; 'Accuracy' measures freedom from morphosyntactic and lexical errors; 'Fluency' measures speed (speech rate, mean length of run), breakdown (pause frequency/placement), and repair (self-corrections)—which trade off under limited attentional resources. |  |  |
| 15 | When should a B1–B2 learner transition from 'Bilingual (L2 -> L1)' definitions to 'Monolingual (L2 -> L2)' learner's dictionary definitions on mined cards? | Once the learner controls roughly 2,000–3,000 core word families (the defining vocabulary of learner's dictionaries like Oxford 3000), monolingual definitions define new words using high-frequency L2 paraphrases, reinforcing L2 semantic networks without L1 interference. |  |  |
| 16 | What is Richard Schmidt's 'Noticing Hypothesis', and why is pure exposure insufficient without attention? | For linguistic input to become 'intake' stored in long-term memory, the learner must consciously register ('notice') the specific surface form and its form-meaning mapping in the input stream; unattended grammatical features often lead to fossilization. |  |  |
| 17 | What is John Sinclair's 'Idiom Principle' versus the 'Open-Choice Principle' in natural language processing and fluency? | The 'Open-Choice Principle' views sentences as slot-by-slot grammatical assemblies of individual words, whereas the 'Idiom Principle' shows that native speakers produce and process language largely through pre-assembled, semi-fixed 'formulaic sequences' retrieved as single chunks from memory. |  |  |
| 18 | What is a 'Collocation' in corpus linguistics, and how does it differ from a free word combination and an opaque idiom? | A collocation is a statistically conventionalized co-occurrence of words (e.g., 'heavy rain', 'make a decision', 'commit a crime') whose meaning is mostly transparent (unlike an opaque idiom such as 'kick the bucket'), yet whose partner choice is restricted by native convention rather than free synonym substitution. |  |  |
| 19 | How do 'Formulaic Sequences' and 'Lexical Bundles' bypass working-memory bottlenecks during real-time B2 speech production? | Because working memory can hold only ~4 chunks simultaneously, retrieving pre-compiled multi-word expressions (e.g., 'as a matter of fact', 'on the other hand', 'it goes without saying that') frees cognitive bandwidth to plan next-clause discourse content while speaking smoothly. |  |  |
| 20 | How do 'Discourse Markers' and 'Pragmatic Hedges' elevate spoken and written cohesion from B1 to B2? | Discourse markers ('moreover, nevertheless, consequently, having said that') explicitly signal logical relations across paragraphs and turns, while pragmatic hedges ('it seems plausible that, to some extent, arguably') calibrate epistemic certainty and politeness in academic and professional registers. |  |  |
| 21 | What are Igor Mel'čuk's 'Lexical Functions' (such as 'Magn', 'Oper1', 'Incep') for organizing collocations systematically? | Lexical functions map universal semantic relations onto language-specific collocates for a given base noun: 'Magn' = intensifier ('heavy rain', 'staunch supporter', 'raving lunatic'), 'Oper1' = support verb performed by the agent ('pay attention', 'lodge a complaint'), and 'Incep' = onset ('war breaks out'). |  |  |
| 22 | According to the Council of Europe's CEFR Companion Volume, what distinguishes a 'B1 (Threshold)' independent user from a 'B2 (Vantage)' independent user? | A 'B1 (Threshold)' user can handle routine travel, work, and familiar topics in connected linear sequences, whereas a 'B2 (Vantage)' user can understand complex abstract/technical texts, interact with native speakers with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that causes no strain for either party, and construct clear, systematic arguments weighing pros and cons. |  |  |
| 23 | What is 'Sociolinguistic Appropriateness' and 'Register Switching' in the CEFR B2 descriptor scales? | Whereas B1 learners operate mainly in a neutral register, B2 learners recognize and adjust formality, politeness conventions, forms of address, and idiomatic phrasing across formal professional/academic contexts and informal conversational settings without unintentional rudeness or stiffness. |  |  |
| 24 | What is 'Semantic Prosody' in corpus linguistics, and how can a near-synonym have the wrong attitudinal aura? | Semantic prosody is the positive, negative, or neutral evaluative connotation a word acquires from its habitual collocates—for example, the phrasal verb 'set in' almost exclusively collocates with negative states ('rot, despair, infection, winter set in'), while 'cause' predominantly takes negative objects. |  |  |
| 25 | How does 'Zipf's Law' explain the sharp drop in word frequency between the top 2,000 core words and mid-frequency B1–B2 vocabulary? | Word frequency follows a power-law distribution: the first 2,000 word families cover ~80–85% of general texts, whereas reaching 98% coverage requires 6,000–9,000 word families; sentence mining bridges this mid-frequency gap by capturing high-utility domain items encountered in real input. |  |  |
| 26 | Why does pause placement (clause-boundary vs. mid-clause pausing) distinguish CEFR B2 speakers from A2/B1 speakers? | Native and B2+ speakers pause primarily at natural syntactic clause boundaries to plan the next proposition, whereas A2/B1 speakers frequently pause mid-clause or mid-constituent to search for individual lexical items or inflections. |  |  |
| 27 | Distinguish between 'Lexical Collocations' and 'Grammatical Collocations (Colligation)' with structural examples. | 'Lexical collocations' combine two open-class content words (Verb + Noun, Adjective + Noun, Adverb + Adjective), whereas 'grammatical collocations (colligation)' bind a content word to a specific grammatical class, preposition, or clause pattern (e.g., 'depend on', 'capable of doing'). |  |  |
| 28 | What is Michael Long's 'Interaction Hypothesis', and how does 'negotiation of meaning' facilitate acquisition? | Conversational interaction promotes acquisition through 'negotiation of meaning'—clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, and conversational 'recasts'—which dynamically tailor input to the learner's exact 'i+1'. |  |  |
| 29 | How does Merrill Swain's 'Comprehensible Output Hypothesis' complement Krashen's Input Hypothesis at the B1–B2 transition? | Comprehending input relies heavily on semantic top-down guessing, whereas producing 'pushed output' (speaking or writing) forces syntactic processing, reveals gaps between what learners want to say and can say ('noticing the hole'), and allows hypothesis testing. |  |  |
| 30 | What does Krashen's 'Affective Filter Hypothesis' state about anxiety, motivation, and self-confidence in language acquisition? | High anxiety, low motivation, or low self-confidence raises an emotional 'affective filter' that blocks comprehensible input from reaching the brain's language acquisition mechanisms, even when the input itself is linguistically understandable. |  |  |
| 31 | How does Krashen's 'Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis' distinguish between acquisition and learning? | 'Acquisition' is a subconscious, implicit process driven by meaningful communication that builds spontaneous fluency, whereas 'learning' is conscious, explicit knowledge of grammatical rules and metalinguistic explanations. |  |  |
| 32 | What is the role of conscious grammar knowledge according to Krashen's 'Monitor Hypothesis', and what three conditions are required to use the Monitor? | Explicitly learned grammar acts only as an editor ('Monitor') to inspect and correct output before or after utterance; using it requires: 1) sufficient time, 2) focus on form (correctness), and 3) explicit knowledge of the rule—which is why over-monitoring impedes spontaneous conversational fluency. |  |  |

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