A colleague recently wrote in response to my comment that people who focus on output instruction would be better off to quit the teaching of languages and go find another profession:
…so apparently that makes me someone who has no place in this community and should find another profession….
I have been thinking about this comment. It’s a dig at what I said. But whether you do that is up to you. My position is very simple. I do not advocate the use of output instruction. I disagree with this by this person as well:
…what I meant by ‘hardline’ is an all for Krashen all for input and minimize output line. Which I did say I thought was probably necessary for the times. In the absence of defiinitive proof of anything I do think Krashen’s ideas are a good thing to go along with in a full on way….
I don’t know what the phrase “necessary for the times” means. Human beings will always acquire languages unconsciously and via input and not output practice in a classroom. That will never change. Look at what such output practices in a classroom have brought us. Nothing. Look what Rosetta Stone has given us. Nothing. Look what Berlitz has given us. Nothing. The list goes on and on.
And to wait for the problem of the “absence of defiinitive proof” to be resolved, that will never happen because what we do is not a science but an art, a wonderfully human art involving what I think are in some unexplainable way almost mystical forces that can never be measured.
I think that language is far more than what we think it is. I think that it is something that cannot be studied scientifically to be one day “proven”.
I would no sooner choose to combine input instruction with output instruction than try to fly to the moon using my legs. That is because it can’t be done in any real way. Why? It is for the reasons outlined above – and is especially connected to the idea that acquiring a language and especially the divinely unconscious process of output and especially speech output is just too complex for any kind of instruction to work in achieving it.
Speech in particular must emerge from the unconscious mind because it is unconsciously created and those who think that they can teach a person how to speak are wingnuts. They might as well try to teach their students to run a marathon backwards. The students would end up all over the place and not get anywhere and we have proof of that in the classrooms where teachers so foolishy try to do that. Been to ACTFL lately? They meet there once a year to tell each other shit that isn’t true.
When I say that such teachers would be better off leaving the profession I mean it, but I don’t say it in a mean way – I mean it as a fact. I just think that teachers who focus on output are spinning their wheels and the wheels of their students when they focus on output, not leaving it to emerge in a natural way, and so the wheels of aquisition never touch the ground.
Input is where the rubber meets the road. So be offended if you like, I certainly didn’t mean it to offend, but how else am I to make my point? By being nice and not offending? That never works in this kind of change. We need to say what we mean. And I mean what I said.