Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

practical only in a foreign language situation, where the teacher is also a speaker of
the (one) student native language, but it does give the possibility for massive
amounts of intake. A USC graduate student, John Cromshaw, has also come up with
an interesting innovation which he calls "Intercambio". In intercambio, as it is
practiced at USC, Americans studying Spanish as a foreign language are teamed
with Spanish-speaking ESL students, and are encouraged to converse on various
topics. The rule is: speak your own language! Cromshaw reports that even less
advanced students exchange enormous amounts of information with each other, and
often, involuntarily, begin to speak in the target language. These approaches have
been validated only informally, but early reports of their success have been quite
encouraging.
Several other activities, better known to the profession, may also fit the
requirements for intake: extensive reading, as recommended by Newmark (1971),
will certainly provide more intake than the difficult paragraphs that require
cryptoanalytic decoding that we sometimes assign second language students. Also,
the use of techniques such as Asher's "total physical response" (Asher, 1966, 1969)
may also provide useful amounts of intake in the classroom, In Asher's approach,
students remain silent in early stages, but are required to obey teacher commands in
the target language, commands that require a "total physical response", beginning
with simple imperatives ("sit down") to more complex sentences ("If John ran to the
blackboard, run after him and hit him with your book"). There is some experimental
evidence in Asher's papers that "TPR" does indeed work: foreign language students,
after 32 hours of TPR, had significantly better listening comprehension scores than
students in "ordinary" classes after 150 hours, and scores on other tests were about
the same. Clearly, teacher input that stimulates a total physical response will be
close to, if not totally intake: it is understood, at an appropriate level, and natural, its
goal being communication.
Before leaving the intake node of the "program tree", several points need
clarification. First, I have posited that intake is fundamental to acquisition, and have
not mentioned what function output may play. It may be argued that theoretically
speaking and writing are not essential to acquisition. One can acquire "competence"
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