adept at skills of conversational management and negotiation of meaning (see discussion later in this chapter; also Scarcella and Higa, forthcoming), may require days or even weeks before he or she can "pick out" that much comprehensible input from the barrage of language heard. The beginning student will simply not understand most of the language around him. It will be noise, unusable for acquisition.

The value of second language classes, then, lies not only in the grammar instruction, but in the simpler "teacher talk", the comprehensible input. It can be an efficient place to achieve at least the intermediate levels rapidly, as long as the focus of the class is on providing input for acquisition.

B. Limitations of the Classroom

Despite my enthusiasm for the second language classroom, there are several ways in which the outside world clearly excels (or some "modification" of the outside world, a fascinating alternative that we shall discuss later), especially for the intermediate level second language student. First, it is very clear that the outside world can supply more input. Living in the country where the language is spoken can result in an all-day second language lesson! As we mentioned earlier, however, for the informal environment to be of any use, the input language has to be comprehensible. The informal environment will therefore be of more and more use as the acquirer progresses and can understand more and more.

Second, as many scholars have pointed out, the range of discourse that the student can be exposed to in a second language classroom is quite limited, no matter how "natural" we make it. There is simply no way the classroom can match the variety of the outside world, although we can certainly expand beyond our current limitations.

The classroom will probably never be able to completely overcome its limitations, nor does it have to. Its goal is not to substitute for the outside world, but to bring students to the point where they can begin to use the outside world for further acquisition, to where they can begin to understand the language used on the outside., it does this in two ways: by supplying input so that students progress in language acquisition, so that they understand "real" language to at least some

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