Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

understanding language that is "a little beyond" our current level of competence.
This is done with the aid of extra-linguistic context or our knowledge of the world.
(In more formal terms if an acquirer is at stage i in acquisition of syntax, he can
progress to stage i + 1 by understanding input at that level of complexity.)
It follows from this that optimal input includes structures that are "just beyond" the
acquirer's current level of competence, and that it tends to get progressively more
complex. This progression, however, need not be exactly matched to the acquirer's
developing competence: "rough tuning" may be optimal. Simply aiming for i + 1
may be less efficient, as one's aim may miss, less review is provided, and where
there is variation in rate of acquisition, fewer acquirers may be accommodated by
the same input (for detailed discussion, see Chapter 9). It also follows that intake is
"natural", which means that it is language used for communication.
One can easily analyze various second language classroom activities to see to what
extent they provide optimal input, as described above. Simple "free conversation"
will often fail as optimal input, as it is often not understood. The failure of free
conversation to qualify as intake implies that second language teaching involves
more than just talking to students about topics of interest, something the profession
has known since its beginning. Administrators, however, sometimes feel that being
a native speaker of a language qualifies one to be a teacher of that language. This
analysis shows why this is not necessarily true.
Mechanical drill also fails as optimal intake for acquisition. Mechanical drill is
activity in which the primary focus is on the form of the language being used rather
than its communicative intent. Here is a sample: given the sentence "John is a
student", change it to the negative ("John isn't a student"). Whether anyone is
interested in the fact that John is or is not a student is, of course, not an issue. Thus,
while mechanical drills may be understood, they are understood only in a trivial
sense. Evidence (Lee, McCune, and Patton, 1970) is available that suggests strongly
that students do not pay much attention to repetitive drill after a few repetitions, and
it is doubtful that the meaning strikes very "deeply" (in the sense of Stevick, 1976).
Mechanical drills are, of course, not natural, nor are they intended to
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