Comprehensible Output Hypothesis

1 thought on “Comprehensible Output Hypothesis”

1. Judy Dubois

   November 10, 2016 at 2:07 pm

   Stephen Krashen has asked me to write up this story about the father of one of my students. His father’s family came to France from Italy when he was a baby, and grew up bilingual, speaking an Italian dialect from northern Italy at home and French with playmates and at school. His father returned to Italy as a young man and brought back an Italian wife who spoke no French. Their first son spoke Italian with his parents and French with everyone else, becoming bilingual like his father. But by the time the second son was born, the mother had acquired some French and the father and older son often spoke together in French, which everyone in the family understood by then. When the younger son tried to speak Italian, they laughed at him. So he quickly stopped trying, although he understood his parents perfectly when they spoke together in Italian. As a child he went to Italy with his parents on vacation, but could not speak Italian, although he understood the dialect. He needed his parents or his brother as intepreters to communicate with those who didn’t understand French.
   After his own marriage he decided to take his new bride, who was French and spoke no Italian, to the native village of his parents. There he found no one who could interpret for him, so he was forced to try to make himself understood in Italian. He was 24 years old and it was the first time that he had tried to produce output. It took only a day or two for him to start speaking fluent Italian. People told him he had a slight French accent and occasionally made gender errors, but otherwise had no difficulty communicating.

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