From Input to Output – VanPatten

Eric has been kind enough to give us a report on his recent read of VanPatten’s book From Input to Output:
It’s only 114 pages and so is way overpriced, but it should be required reading for all FL teachers. As James F. Lee wrote in the Foreword:
“. . . some basic notions that teachers and administrators should have about the learning of another language, especially if they make decisions about curricula and/or evaluate the expected outcomes of those curricula.” VP then wrote in the Preface that the book could be used as “the main text in an extension course for public school teachers.” I wish! It’s a book that would rock non-CI FL teachers’ worlds or as VP says, have “the rug yanked out from under you.” Haha.
The book says much of what he says in his 6 video series [ed. note: definitely watch that if you have time and haven’t done so yet – find it in the Primers above] as well as in his articles, but he did go into more detail into some of the stuff that is harder to grasp – his input processing principles, parsing, parameter setting, accommodation, restructuring, hierarchical structure of the abstract syntactic system, lexical association networks, accessing and production strategies for outputting, Processability Theory, and skill development.
VP is claiming that this book can be read by the layperson, but I highly doubt that. There are still things VP leaves out that I think important to practice or connections he doesn’t make between practice and theory. I would LOVE to have time this summer to write something truly accessible, shorter, and cheap – a short pamphlet that could be read by FL teachers. It would be a time consuming project, so I’d first want to make sure my labor would not be in vain, that someone would read it. Haha!
And VP does concede at least twice in the book that there are a handful of scholars in SLA that do not accept abstract syntactic systems and do support skill-building (e.g. DeKeyser), whereas VP’s premise is that language acquisition is different (special) from development of other types of knowledge. How VP counters skill-building is much the same as Krashen: the complexity of language would deem it too hard a task to master it all via practice AND skill-building can’t explain how it is a L2 learner can know and do things in the language that were NEVER taught or practiced.
VP starts and ends the book with a wonderful quote from a paper by S. Pit Corder, originally from 1967, which VP says probably marked the onset of contemporary SLA research:
“We have been reminded recently of von Humboldt’s statement that we cannot really teach language, we can only create conditions in which it will develop spontaneously in the mind in its own way. We shall never improve our ability to create such favorable conditions until we learn more about the way a learner learns and what his built-in syllabus is. When we do know this (and the learner’s errors will, if systematically studied, tell us something about this) we may begin to be more critical of our cherished notions. We may be able to allow the learner’s innate strategies to dictate our practice and determine our syllabus; we may learn to adapt ourselves to his needs rather than impose upon him our preconceptions of how he ought to learn, what he ought to learn and when he ought to learn it.”
Beautiful! Going to make this my Facebook status 😉
In a recent email to Mike Coxon I verbalized for the first time what I see as the difference between Krashen and VP. While Krashen thinks just focus on meaning (CI) and lots of it is enough, VP wants some focus on form – i.e. simultaneous focus on meaning AND form (e.g. input enhancement, processing instruction, recasts) and also distinguishes between acquisition (implicit linguistic system) and skill development (output fluency and accuracy). In a sense, VP and Krashen are saying the same thing, since Krashen wants CI and VP is saying that some focus on form is necessary in order that the input be accurately comprehended. So VP has offered us an input-based explanation and solution for the most common critique of CI – those French immersion programs that developed fluency, but not desired levels of accuracy. VP believes that attending to input solely for meaning can develop less accuracy, but that if we want more accuracy, it still requires a learner to process input!
VP also thinks input alone is not most effective for 2 reasons:
1) interaction (output) facilitates better input processing, albeit indirectly – you get modified input and pay more attention to gaps (Krashen posits the same)
2) once acquisition has happened, output (always meaning-based) is necessary to develop the ability (skill) to best rely on what has been acquired. But VP says “Currently, we have almost no SLA research on skill development in speaking.”
Eric