Learner Output In Foreign Language Teaching And Learning

This M. A. thesis aims to probe into the role of output in foreign language teaching and learning, arguing that producing the target language on the learners' part can facilitate their L2 learning in various aspects.Input and output are two essential factors for successful L2 learning. Input refers to the language materials that L2 learners receive through their exposure to target language environment, especially through listening and reading, while output is defined as the actual production and use of the target language, including speaking and writing.Since Krashen proposed his Input Hypothesis, language input has become the focus of SLA studies, attracting many applied linguists' attention. However, with too much attention paid to the input, the role of output is, to some degree, neglected or minimized. The imbalance of the attention devoted to the two necessary elements had not been changed until the mid-1980s. Since then, more and more researchers have paid increasing attention to the importance and significance of output in foreign language teaching and learning, which can be considered as a shift of attention from the role of input to that of output. As a result, successive observations and insights have been obtained in diverse researches and studies of output. Among these, Merril Swain's Comprehensible Output Hypothesis is the most prominently elaborated and persuasively systematic. In her research on Canadian learners learning L2 in immersion classes, Swain concluded that comprehensible input is not the sole factor for successful L2 learning, arguing that output serves an indispensable learning purpose.From these studies and researches, we can draw the conclusion that besides merely enhancing fluency, producing output can achieve some other functions, which relate more to accuracy. In essence, three major functions can be clarified. First, output can serve as a tool triggering learners to notice the gap or mismatch between their interlanguage system and the target language. Second, output can function as a tool for learners to form and test their hypotheses about the target language. Third, output can help L2 learners to focus more on syntactic processing of their interlanguage performance, improving their accuracy in target language production.Based upon output studies, two primary categories of implications are acquired. First, this thesis argues that teachers need to require or, more specifically, push L2 learners to produce thetarget language. Since output is so facilitative for foreign language learning, learners need to be compulsorily immersed into producing pushed output. Second, this thesis also suggests that L2 learners need to reprocess and modify their non-target-like output through negotiation and repair work to reach a self-repair. That is to say, when they notice, either by self- or other-initiation, the non-target-likeness in their previously produced output, they can work collaboratively with their peers or teachers to produce modified output. The process of learners' reaching self-repairs can therefore be tegarded as a consolidation of their existing knowledge about the target language and, simultaneously, as an internalization of some new knowledge.As the chief concern, this thesis also attempts to relate the output studies and their relevant implications to the language classroom practice in China. Four major suggestions are put forward, aiming to facilitate FLT in China with these profound implications.As to the teaching practice, this thesis designs a number of output-based activities on a classroom organization model, arguing that these types of activities can effectively provide teachers with an ideal context for pushing learners to produce the target language and similarly equip learners with sufficient opportunities and time to repair their output to eventually achieve self-repairs by producing the modified output. In this way, these learners can gain a better command of the target language and thus the teaching is promoted.The following is the frame...