is our insistence on early speaking and our attitudes towards errors. Why make students suffer from procedures that are unpleasant even to us?

There is more to say on the topic of error correction; it has some advantages, and other disadvantages, and we will look at these later on when we discuss conscious learning in the classroom What needs to be said here is only that error correction is not the basic mechanism for improving second language performance; rather, we acquire via comprehensible input, according to the theory. Since overuse of correction has such negative effects for acquisition, and since error correction is not of direct benefit to language acquisition (see Chapter II, discussion of hypothesis one), a safe procedure is simply to eliminate error correction entirely in communicative-type activities, a procedure used with great success in Terrell's Natural Approach. Improvement will come without error correction, and may even come more rapidly, since the input will "get in", the filter will be lower, and students will be off the defensive.

2. PROVIDE TOOLS TO HELP STUDENTS OBTAIN MORE INPUT

Our responsibility goes beyond the language classroom.¹⁵ Indeed, as I have stated earlier, our task is to provide the students with the tools they need to continue improving without us. We need to provide enough input so that they can gain the linguistic competence necessary to begin to take advantage of the informal environment, the outside world. In other words, they need to know enough of the second language so they can understand significant portions of non-classroom language. Building their linguistic competence to this point, however, is not enough.

Even if we do succeed in bringing our students to this stage, they will have problems in using the language on the outside. They will still not understand a great deal of the input they hear, even if it is modified. They will find themselves at a loss for words, and will make mistakes at all levels. If we focus only on providing the input for purely "linguistic" competence, we will have students who avoid contact with native speakers for fear they will not understand much of what is said to them, and who will have real problems when they are engaged in conversation, including painful silences while they search for words, confusion and embarrassment due to misunderstanding, etc.

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