Response to Yang et al. (2021): Clarifying the Input Hypothesis

In this article, Charlie Taylor offers a commentary on Yang et al.'s 2021 "Reading in a Foreign Language" article, "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation." In their study, Yang et al. analyzed the effects of text difficulty on the reading comprehension and motivation of high school students participating in an EFL extensive reading program in Taiwan. The researchers provided one experimental group with graded readers that were one level below their current vocabulary level, and another with books that were one level above. The authors' stated aim was to determine the optimum reading level for students by testing two hypotheses: The automaticity principle (Day & Bamford, 1998), and the Input Hypothesis (Krashen, 1982). They claimed that these two hypotheses are "contrastive" (Yang et al., 2021, p. 79) because the automaticity principle recommends students read below their current vocabulary level, whereas the Input Hypothesis implies students should read above their current level. In this commentary, Taylor briefly examines the authors' claim that because the group reading lower-level texts made greater comprehension gains in this study, the results "may not support the postulate of the Input Hypothesis that input at one level beyond learners' capacity may promote acquisition" (Yang et al., 2021, p. 91). [For Yang et al.'s study "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation," see EJ1296460.]