promoted here. Could we teach language primarily by encouraging production, with little or no input, and correcting all errors? Such a technique, in addition to being maddening, relies entirely on the students' ability to learn grammar.

This is not to say that error correction is totally useless and that learning is of no value. Learning has a role to play, and error correction may be of use in certain situations. We will return later to the question of "putting learning in its place".

By now the reader has seen enough promises of "more on this topic later", and it is time to turn to the major portion of this chapter, a description of the characteristics of optimal input for second language acquisition, where hopefully the promises this introduction has made will be kept.

D. Characteristics of Optimal input for Acquisition

I will attempt in this section to present a set of requirements that should be met by any activity or set of materials aimed at subconscious language acquisition. The (testable) prediction that this set of characteristics makes is that an activity that fits the characteristics fully will encourage acquisition at the fastest possible rate. An activity that fits none of them could result in zero acquisition, or very little acquisition. (The latter, "very little", is more likely. The "language acquisition device" may be so powerful, even in the adult, that some minimal acquisition may occur as a result of any exposure to language.)

The characteristics described below are not "weighted". There is no attempt to claim that one is more important than another, although such claims should possibly be made. I will leave this to future refinements. Also, there is no attempt here to "support" these conclusions by empirical evidence. They derive from second language acquisition theory, the hypotheses presented in Chapter II. It is these hypotheses that are supported by empirical evidence. In other words, we are looking here only at implications of theory. This does not mean that the characteristics cannot be treated as predictions and further tested; indeed, they should be confirmed by both applied linguistics research as well as teacher and student intuition, as I discussed in Chapter 1.

We discuss each characteristic separately, showing what predictions

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