Robert makes a nice connection between the need for teachers to get instant gratification for their L2 instruction in the form of forced output when everything Krashen has ever shown us tells us to wait and not force output, both in the form of writing and of speech:
Most of us here in the PLC have students who are outputting within the first semester; we are simply opposed to artificially forced output*.
*I use the term “artificially forced output” to refer to what happens in schools in order to take the edge off the insatiable appetite for “data”. To me the good kind of “forced output” is when a learner is in an immersion situation and has a compelling reason to produce language that has already been acquired but which has been inhibited by lack of confidence or a high affective filter.
I responded to Robert:
And it’s not just the need for data in these teachers but a kind of perverse need on the part of the teacher of forced output to SEE and HEAR something in class. They want something impossible. They want the rocket to blast off before it has an engine.
They don’t respect Krashen’s findings. They want to pry the flower open before it’s ready to bloom. They don’t seem to respect how we really acquire languages, and yet these people do this for a profession! If these clueless teachers can get a smart kid to say something in the TL in class, well, then, they must be doing a good job. Heaven forbid they wait.
When this kind of forced output is done with small children in the process of acquistion of their first language, some end up as stutterers, and it sure doesn’t speed things up. Rather, it’s how much quality L1 those little kids hear around them, what Krashen calles the “din”. When forced output is done in L2 classes when the kid is a teenager, most of those kids just quit after they get their two years in, because they feel they “can’t do it”, which they can’t!
I wouldn’t ask a ten year old child to drive a car, nor would they want to! They’re not ready! If some hot to trot teacher got in my face right now expecting me to output some Chinese, when all I have is about thirty hours from Linda and Annick at workshops and observing in Annick’s classroom over the years, I would shut down too.
So let our mantra be (and who cares about data collection because it won’t work anyway) “late occurring natural output” instead of “early forced output”. Our classes at levels 3 and 4 will have a lot more people in them, and they will be full of beautiful flowers, each blooming at the right time for the flower, not for us. That’s how language acquisition really works – in a natural way.