Krashen – Easy Way 4 (Output Hypotheses)

More from Dr. Krashen’s The Easy Way:
“A second rival hypothesis is the output hypothesis, which claims that we acquire language by producing it. There are several versions of the output hypothesis, but they all suffer from these problems: First, output istooscarce to make any important impact on langauge development; language students speak ralatively infrequently in language classes, and people write much less than they read.As Smith (1988) has pointed out, we don’t write nearly enought to account for the qzquisition fo complex systems such as spelling and the other vonventions of writing. Second, studies also show that increasing student writing does notincrease wirting ability (Krashen, 1994).” (p. 7)
[ed. note 1: the TCI team at Abraham Lincoln High School, my new employer, was forced into a lot of writing two years ago by the administration. Annick Chen and her team did more writing, but scores in writing did not improve (in fact, they went down), validating Krashen’s 1994 study]
[ed. note 2: this makes three areas where doing what administrators think is best for students in general does not apply to our field of language instruction – homework, technology, and now writing]
[note: all blog entries about this book are published here with permission of the author]