Page 122 - Beyond Methods

110 Facilitating negotiated interaction
lighted the importance of modified input and modified interaction in L2 development. They have also started focusing on the language output that learners produce as a result of input and interactional modifications.
COMPREHENSIBLE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS
Research on learner output is fairly new because, traditionally, out- put has been treated as a final outcome of what has already been learned, and not as a source of learning itself. The precise role learner output plays in L2 development is as yet undetermined. The impetus for output studies came from Merrill Swain (1985), who suggested that, while comprehensible input and negotiated inter- action are essential, what she called comprehensible output is equally important. She argued that negotiated interaction “needs to incor- porate the notion of being pushed towards the delivery of a message that is not only conveyed, but that is conveyed precisely, coherently, and appropriately” (Swain, 1985, pp. 248–9). She further asserted that production “may force the learner to move from semantic pro- cessing to syntactic processing” (p. 249). In other words, an attempt to produce language will move learners from processing language at the level of word meaning (which can sometimes be done by guessing from the context or by just focusing on key words) to pro- cessing language at the level of grammatical structures (which re- quires a much higher level of cognitive activity).
In a later work, Swain (1995) identified three possible functions of output: the noticing function, the hypothesis-testing function, and the metalinguistic function. The noticing function relates to the possibility that when learners try to communicate in their still- developing target language, they may encounter a linguistic prob- lem and become aware of what they do not know or know only par- tially. Such an encounter may raise their consciousness and lead to an appropriate, conscious action on their part.
The hypothesis-testing function of output relates to the possibil- ity that when learners use the target language, they may be experi- menting with what works and what does not. In fact, learner output, however deficient, can itself be an indication of the learners’ attempt to test how something should be said and written. Moreover, when they participate in negotiated interaction and receive negative feed- back, they are likely to test different hypotheses about a particular linguistic system.