vocabulary is best acquired, and, most important, retained. There is some agreement among teachers that vocabulary should be taught in context, rather than by rote memorization of list (see Celce-Murcia and Rosenzweig, 1979, for several techniques), but it may even be the case that vocabulary should not be directly taught at all! It may be the case that if we supply enough comprehensible input, vocabulary acquisition will in fact take care of itself.

Let me restate this suggestion in the form of an informal experiment: Given ten minutes of study time (waiting for a bus, etc.), which activity would be more useful for the language acquirer interested in long-term retention of vocabulary?

Method (3) relies on comprehensible input to supply new vocabulary in enough frequency, and to help the acquirer determine the meaning. In method (3) there is no conscious focus on vocabulary, only on meaning. The prediction (hope?) is that really important words will reoccur naturally and their meanings will be made increasingly obvious by the context. It does not exclude the possibility that the acquirer may be helped by occasional glances at the dictionary or occasional definitions by a teacher.

The American Language Institute at USC, for example, offers a course in typing along with its offerings in English as a Second Language for foreign students.

There may be further opportunities for providing optimal input for second language acquirers at the university level, which we will discuss in Chapter V.

For some Monitor users and linguists, explicit grammatical information is, oddly enough, interesting and relevant, since such acquirers believe it will help their performance. In this case, the medium is the message. If a course on the structure of the target language is taught in the target language, and if the students are "analytic" types, the course will be a success. (See comments in Krashen, 1980, and in Chapter V.)

There are exceptions, examples of comprehensible input in which i + 1 may not be present. These include situations in which the discourse is limited, and in many instrumental uses of language in which familiarity with a few routines and patterns may suffice for successful communication (e.g. dealing with gas station attendants, clerks, etc.).

"Internalization", in my interpretation, seems to mean the acquisition of a rule that was first learned, where learning is assumed to have caused the subsequent acquisition. According to the theory of second language acquisition presented in Chapter II, this does not occur. I have discussed this in several technical papers (Krashen, 1977) and will review this point in a later section.

Another analogy that comes to mind is "shotgun" versus single bullet. The former has a better chance of hitting the target.

Varvel (1979) describes a silent period in formal instruction (Silent Way methodology) that lasted considerably longer, indicating that there may be a fair amount of individual variation in the duration of the silent period for adults in language classes:

"There was a woman from Taiwan who after several weeks was still conspicuously silent in class. She never talked, and when called upon would only answer in a whisper, saying only what was required. It was clear, however, that she was one of