SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

The comprehensible output hypothesis has numerous difficulties.

- Output and especially comprehensible output is too scarce to make a real contribution to linguistic competence.
- High levels of linguistic competence are possible without output.
- There is no direct evidence that comprehensible output leads to language acquisition.

In addition, there is some evidence that suggests that students do not enjoy being "pushed" to speak.

The original impetus for the CO hypothesis was the observation that students in French immersion, despite years of input, were not as good as observers felt they should be in grammatical aspects of their second language (Swain, 1985). Input, it was suggested, was therefore not enough. It can be argued, however, that we haven't yet given comprehensible input a real chance. We have yet to see how students will do if their classes are filled with comprehensible input, if they have access to a great deal of very interesting reading and listening materials (films, tapes), and if the acquisition situation is genuinely free of anxiety. (There is evidence that children in French immersion do very little pleasure reading in their second language; Romney, Romney and Menzies, 1995).

Given the consistent evidence for comprehensible input (Krashen, 1994) and failure of other means of developing language competence, providing more comprehensible input seems to be a more reasonable strategy than increasing output.

NOTES

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