Merrill Swains Output Hypothesis

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Visit https://www.LingQ.com • My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ • My Facebook Page: / lingosteve • My Twitter: / lingosteve • Follow Steve's Cafe Channel: / stevekaufmann • Transcript: Hi there, Steve here. If you’re interested in language learning, please subscribe to my channel. I have another channel where I talk about politics. Both of these channels, the videos, the audio, the transcript are available as lessons as LingQ, please check in the description box. Today, I want to talk about output because I had a question from one of my viewers about Swan’s Output Theory or hypothesis, so I looked that up because I wasn’t aware of it. • Basically, what Swain says is that we learn from output because output enables us to identify our gaps, gaps between what we want to say and what we’re able to say. Second of all, output has a hypothesis-testing function. When a learner says something, there is a tacit hypothesis underlying his utterance about grammar. In other words, we test whether we know the grammar. It’s kind of like the same as finding our gaps, I don’t see the difference. The third thing is a metalinguistic function. Learners reflect on the language they learn and thereby the output enables them to control and internalize linguistic knowledge. To me, it’s all the same. • Yes, we need output. The issue without output, to me, is it’s a question of how much output when. Traditional language instruction puts a lot of emphasis on output and correct output at an early stage. The teacher teaches something and you’ve got to reproduce it and reproduce it correctly. I think that’s wrong because my experience has been that until I’ve had a lot of the language brought into me that it’s very difficult to remember things and it’s very difficult to get the structure right. • So a very minimal amount of output in the initial stages is enough, besides which output at the initial stage can be quite stressful because you can’t say anything, long silences, you comment on the weather over and over again. The other thing is any output implies an engagement with someone. So you can’t just output without having a conversation coming back at you and if you don’t understand what’s being said you can’t have a meaningful conversation. So for those reasons I’m not a big fan of speaking at an early stage. • The fact is that input, reading, listening and paying attention, is so powerful as a way of ingesting, getting the language in you, learning. It’s faster, in my opinion, than speaking. At an early stage if all the words you’re using are the words that you are able to use, you are going to have a very limited amount of the language that you are engaging with, whereas with listening and reading you can engage with much more of the language and it’s easier to organize and carry with you and so forth and so on. But at a certain point, for sure, you need to speak and you need to a lot. When you do speak later on you do identify your gaps, you see which structures you aren’t able to use, which words you aren’t able to find, so this is extremely valuable. • However, I would say the language density, the intensity and the quantity of words, etc. that you deal with when you are engaged in meaningful input and listening to and reading things of interest is much greater than what you can do in an output exercise, so I have conversations. I spoke Czech for an hour yesterday, I spoke Russian for an hour today and I think that a few hours a week of output, in other words conversation, is plenty. Then, I receive my report from my LingQ tutor, I go over the words that I had trouble with and all of this helps me to noticing things in my listening and reading. • In a given language, call it either Czech, Russian, Polish, whatever, if I have a couple of hours per week of output that’s enough, but I might have a couple of hours or an hour to two hours a day of input activity and that’s the biggest part of my learning. Eventually, as I progress, obviously I want to do more and more output. If I had the opportunity to travel to the country where the language is spoken, then I could spend a lot more time with output. • So output is important. Swain’s hypothesis kind of splits hairs, in a way, but still input over output, input before output, input more than output, that’s my take on it. I look forward to hearing from you, bye for now.

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