that it is far easier, technologically speaking, to use the lab as a means of supplying comprehensible input than for other purposes. The traditional use of the language lab puts a tremendous technological and pedagogical burden on the teacher: the teacher is expected to monitor student output, and correct their errors. Using the lab as a source of comprehensible input is easier. Here are some possibilities: taped stories, with pictures to aid comprehension and add to enjoyment, class-type lectures, supplemented with lecture notes (on real topics, designed to supplement international classes, not sample lectures on random aspects of chemistry or the history of a pretend kingdom), radio programs, commercials, etc. In other words, comprehensible input, with simple aids to comprehension.

In my view, the lab should be a resource, a place students can go to get input on a variety of subject matters whenever it is convenient for them. The old view of the lab, with the vigilant drill master, does not allow this.¹⁰

2. A COMMENT ON FIELD TESTING OF MATERIALS

This slightly new approach to materials might also necessitate a slightly new approach to field testing. I think I can best illustrate this by relating a conversation I had several years ago with a representative of a publishing house that is active in both ESL and foreign language materials. He had come to see me because of our work on the order of acquisition of grammatical structures (e.g. Bailey, Madden and Krashen, 1974; Krashen et al., 1978; Krashen et al., 1976; Houck, Roberson and Krashen, 1978a) feeling that our work, and similar word done by other researchers, might give his writers a better sequence to base their readers on. He accepted it as a given fact that readers designed for students needed to be controlled for structures, and that our natural order studies would provide a superior basis for this. Book one, for example, would contain only those structures found to be early acquired, book two would add those structures slightly farther down on the natural order, etc.

I have argued against this philosophy several times in this volume. As Stevick (1980) notes, it leads to a style "which is linguistically antiseptic and emotionally sterile" (p. 203; see also his excellent discussion,

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