Creating materials and providing input that meet this characteristic may appear to be an easy and obvious task, but my view is that, in reality, this requirement is not easy to meet, nor has the profession considered it obvious. It is very difficult to present and discuss topics of interest to a class of people whose goals, interests, and backgrounds differ from the teacher's and from each other's. I also claim that relevance and interest have not been widely perceived as requirements for input, since so many materials fail to meet this requirement.

It is fairly easy to think up examples of input that, while comprehensible, are universally perceived to be uninteresting and irrelevant. Among the most obvious examples are pattern drill, and most dialogue type exercises. Experimental evidence suggests that students pay little or no attention to meaning after the first few repetitions in pattern drill (Lee, McCune, and Patton, 1970), and the same result is most likely true for dialogues that are memorized by rote. Grammatical exercises also fail as input for acquisition on similar grounds. Granted, the goals of these exercises are not "acquisition", and we will have occasion to examine whether these input-types fill other needs in the second language program. Nevertheless, they fail this requirement dismally.

Somewhat less obvious is the failure of "meaningful drill" to qualify as optimal input for acquisition. "Meaningful drill" is distinguished from "mechanical drill", in that the former requires that real meaning be involved (Paulston, 1972). Since meaningful drill is designed to provide practice on particular grammatical structures, however, it is very difficult to also build in the exchange of truly relevant or interesting information, as in:

            What time does he get up in the morning?
            What time do they get up in the morning?

At best, such information is of only mild interest to members of a language class. I believe that it is an impossible task for teachers to embed truly interesting or relevant information into the form of a meaningful drill on a daily basis.

Some other fairly widespread input types that fall short of the mark of true relevance are the reading assignments that most foreign language students work through in introductory courses. Generally, these selections bear very little resemblance to the kind of reading the students would do in their first language on their own time.

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