Speaking or comprehension: which comes first?

Today I'm going to talk about speaking.

I'm going to talk about output, and I'm going to begin by saying that speaking,

just speaking, is not communicating, and I'll tell you what I mean by that.

A number of people have asked me to do a video about the output hypothesis.

Now, you are familiar with Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis, and

I'm a great fan of Krashen's Hypothesis on how we learn.

And let me just go over the five main points of Krashen's Input Hypothesis.

And then I'm going to talk a little bit about the Output Hypothesis and

explain what I consider to be the relationship between output or speaking

and genuine communication and learning in the acquisition of a language.

Krashen's Theory of Language Acquisition consists of five points.

The first point is.

What he calls the input hypothesis.

We learn from meaningful input, input that's just a little difficult for

us, hopefully input of interest, and that this is a natural process.

And this leads us to point number two.

And that is the distinction that Krashen makes between learning and acquisition.

Learning is a deliberate study of the language and in his mind, it's completely

disconnected from the sort of subconscious process of acquiring a language.

Then there is the monitor hypothesis, which says that grammar instruction,

or the rules of grammar that we study, become a monitor, and if we speak trying

to use the language while referring to this monitor, it makes us less spontaneous

and less able to use the language.

The fourth point in Krashen's theory of language acquisition is the natural order

of acquisition, which says that regardless of whichever rules we study or the effort

put in by teachers to drill us or test us on certain forms or structures in

the language, we will gradually acquire these according to a natural order.

We will learn some faster than others, and I've referred to this before in my videos.

And finally, Krashen refers to the affective filter, which says the more

stress the learner is placed under, the more fear, the more sense of intimidation,

the harder it is to produce the language.

This is called the affective, like the emotional, the affective filter.

Obviously, it's a filter.

Something that we want to minimize.

Now, because this theory, Krashen's theory of language acquisition and

the emphasis on input had become very popular, there was a counter theory

proposed by a Canadian language teacher called Merrill Swain and based

on her experience with, uh, English speaking kids in the, uh, French

immersion program in Canadian schools.

So she said that there are three.

Sort of points in her output hypothesis.

Output is important because of the noticing hypothesis that by outputting

learners become aware of the gaps in their knowledge, uh, where they might

think they know something when they go to speak and it doesn't, you know, come

out that way they would like, or they discover errors, then this helps them

notice the gaps in their knowledge.

The second aspect of the output hypothesis was what she called

the hypothesis testing function.

And that is that learners would have some hypothesis about how the language

works and that by speaking they are able to test whether their understanding

of the language in fact corresponds to The way the language works.

And the third thing she talks about is metalinguistic function, which is

some ability for the learner to gain a better sort of overall sense of the

structure of the language through output.

So there you have it, the input hypothesis and the output hypothesis.

The output hypothesis, Merrill Swain developed this theory based on

looking at French immersion kids.

She claimed that, uh, the kids in French immersion.

And she was doing this work in the seventies, uh, acquired native

like comprehension in French, but that certain errors in grammar

persisted in their output.

My three grandchildren who went to school here in Canada, they

all went to French immersion.

Uh, two of them are not available.

So I spoke to my grandson and got some more insight on French immersion.

So first of all, the input in a French immersion class, Is largely what comes

from the teacher or their reading, uh, because there's 25, 30 English speaking

kids in a classroom, the teacher speaks to them in French, they reply to the

teacher in French, or they're supposed to, they're supposed to speak French

to their classmates and they don't.

So the amount of input they get is, is somewhat limited.

It's nowhere near the kind of input that we recommend at LingQ.

That people need, you know, hours and hours and hours of listening

in order to acquire a language.

So it's limited input.

Their major output activity is writing.

True. They don't get to speak very much.

They might reply to the teacher.

My grandson said it would have been a good idea.

And maybe this is something that's possible nowadays to have a Zoom session.

With French speaking school kids in Quebec or in France or Belgium or

some French speaking country somewhere else, but that was not the case.

They didn't do that.

So writing, but writing is very good and they used to write by hand and that

was a very good way to generate output.

And of course, when you're writing, you have the time to look things

up and work on your grammar.

They also had a lot of grammar instructions.

However, the net result is they do continue making a lot of grammar mistakes.

And I know from my own experience, when I went to school and we did French,

we had a lot of grammar instruction.

And I also continued making a lot of mistakes until I had had enough

input because I became motivated and I listened and I read books and I watched

movies and eventually went to France.

So the thought that somehow.

A more grammar focused or output focused, you know, approach to teaching

in the schools is going to reduce the amount of errors that the kids make.

I, I'm somewhat skeptical.

And, uh, I go back to Krashen's natural order of acquisition.

I go back to the fact that people who are very fluent in English that I've

done business with from different countries, they continue to make mistakes.

Like we continue to make mistakes.

That's just part of the process of acquiring a language.

And so this gets me to the point of like, what is output?

What is speaking?

Why do we want to put pressure on people to speak?

Communicating implies a two way flow of information.

If you can output something, if you can say something, but you don't understand

what the other person is saying.

You are not communicating.

So an emphasis on output, getting people to speak, getting people

to speak in a non meaningful way.

And that's where my grandson's suggestion of having a, uh, an exchange with

the students from a French speaking school is so good because then it

becomes meaningful communication.

However, if the teacher is then monitoring this communication between

school kids in say Quebec and West Vancouver, and the kids are aware of

that, that introduces again, this.

Effective filter, the concern that they will be judged on how well they speak,

which of course is counterproductive.

What you want them to do is to engage in communication.

Try out what they can try or what they feel comfortable using and

gradually grow their language skills.

In fact, from the research on how the brain gets to output, it's clear

that the brain will throw something out that's in its memory, that's

put there either through listening or reading or whatever, speaking.

It's sort of thrown on the wall, so to speak.

And it gets the conversation going if we're struggling in a new language.

And then the second thing the brain does is it goes to a

structure that we used before.

That again, sort of scaffolds the speaker who's uncertain in the language into at

least being able to produce something.

And then it'll pick up on what comes back, but we do need to have this

treasure chest of words and structures that we've heard so often and read so

often that we're confident in trying them out above and beyond the fact

that we need to be able to understand what the other person is saying.

So here again, just being able to say something, a limited number of

things, not understand what's said back to you is not communicating.

And the difficulty with trying to pressure people to speak before they're

ready is that they can only use a very limited range of vocabulary.

This means that the other.

Party to the conversation can only use a limited range of vocabulary back at them.

So the opportunity for growth in sort of language knowledge there is quite limited.

And finally, grammar is not communicating.

I played golf again the other day with.

Uh, a young man who went to the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario.

And one of their four pillars there is bilingualism.

So you have to be fluent in French.

And, uh, he said that he had no trouble with the speaking and the

comprehension and the reading.

But when he was asked to say whether this was This particular

verb was in l'imparfait or le passé simple or le passé composé.

All these grammatical terms, he was stumped.

So grammar is kind of an overlay of complication over developing a natural

sense of how words are used and which words are used with other words.

And I remember when I was correcting people at LingQ that in English,

it was far more common for learners To make mistakes in word usage.

In other words, use words together that are not normally used together rather

than obvious quote, grammatical mistakes.

That's not to say that you can't look at a grammar book and I do from time to time.

I'm doing it now in Turkish, but I don't expect to remember anything

from the grammar explanation or the grammar instructions rather.

I hope that that'll help me notice certain things when I'm reading and listening.

So again, it's not to argue about which hypothesis is correct.

I think the important thing is where do we want to spend

our time as language learners?

Of course we want to speak.

We want to speak a lot eventually.

When we speak, should we worry about how accurate our grammar is?

If the grammar will gradually get better anyway, shouldn't

we just enjoy communicating?

Put the emphasis on communicating with as little stress as possible and hopefully

in a meaningful way and sort of combine that with our continued input activities.

And in that way, we will gradually achieve what we want, which is

effective, meaningful communication in the language we're learning.

Thanks for listening.