4.3. Input and output

In deciding how to approach the teaching and learning of English we can divide classroom activities into two broad categories: those that give students language input, and those which encourage them to produce language output. Whether acquisition or conscious learning is taking place, there will be stages at which the student is receiving language. That is, language is in some way being put into the students, though they will decide whether or not they want to receive it.

But exposing students to language input is not enough. We also need to provide opportunity for them to activate this knowledge. For it is only when students are producing language that they can select from the input they have received. Language production allows students to rehearse language use in classroom conditions and at the same time to receive feedback from the teachers (other students, themselves). Feedback allows them to adjust their perceptions of the language they have received.

This production of language, or language output, can be divided into two distinct sub-categories: practice output and communicative output. In the first, practice, students are asked to use new items of language in different contexts. Activities are designed which promote the use of specific language or tasks. The aim is to give students a chance to rehearse language structures and functions so that they may focus on items that they wish to internalise more completely than before. At the same time students are being engaged in meaningful and motivating activities.

A further distinction can be made according to the level of the language material under training. At the simpler level of activation, practice I, exercises in imitation, substitution, transformation and guided reproduction are performed. The language item under study seldom exceeds a sentence or a phrase. It is an isolated phenomenon (a sound, a lexical item, a structure, an intoneme, an orthogram) which is practised. At the higher level of activation, practice II, communicatively orientated activities in complex transformation and reproduction and reference-based production are performed. The language item under study is no less than a super-phrasal unit. It is a speech item that is trained in a flow of words as discourse. Practice output marks some kind of a halfway stage between input and communication output.

Communicative output refers to activities in which students use language as a vehicle for communication. Their main purpose is to complete some kind of communicative task. Because the task in a communicative activity is of paramount importance, the language used to perform it takes second place. The language becomes an instrument of communication rather than being an end in itself. In most communicative activities the students will be using any and /or all the language that they know. They will be forced to access the language they have in their language store. And they will gradually develop strategies for communication that over-concentration on presentation and practice would almost certainly inhibit.

A further distinction has to be made between two different kinds of input: roughly-tuned input and finely-tuned input.

Roughly-tuned input is language which the students can more or less understand even though it is above their own productive level. The teacher is a major source of roughly-tuned input. So are the reading and listening texts we provide for our students. At lower level such material is likely to be roughly-tuned in the way we have suggested. So while we are training students in the skills for reading and listening in English we are also exposing them to language, some of which may form part of their acquired language store. In 1982 S. Krashen substituted the term ‘roughly-tuned input’ with the so-called comprehensible input. Comprehensible input is language which students can comprehend without too much difficulty. One of the factors necessary for successful comprehensible input is that students should feel free from anxiety. This is particularly of primary importance in the so-called Natural Approach. The Natural Approach places heavy emphasis on pre-speaking phase where students receive roughly-tuned input and react to it, but are not forced into immediate production.

Finely-tuned input is language which has been very precisely selected at the students’ level. For our purposes finely-tuned input can be taken to mean that language which we select for conscious learning and teaching. Such language is often the focus of the presentation of new language where repetition, teacher correction, discussion and discovery techniques are frequently used to promote the cognitive strategies.

During the presentation stage teachers tend to act as controllers, both selecting the language the students are to use and asking for the accurate reproduction of new language items. They will want to correct the mistakes they hear and see at this stage fairly rigorously. This is in marked contrast to the kind of correction that is generally offered in practice and communicative activities.

We can summarise the components of input and output like this:

INPUT OUTPUT

Finely-tuned input

Practice output

Communicative output

Roughly-tuned input

The dotted lines show how output – and both the learner’s and the teacher’s reaction to it – may feed back into input. Even during a communicative activity a student’s output and the degree of success that output achieves may provide valuable information about that language which is then internalised. Teacher correction during a practice activity may give the student more input information about the language in question.