Imagine yourself being a student sitting in a language class. The teacher has just finished explaining a certain rule of grammar, and now is asking you an assessment question. Answering the question: one part of your mind starts putting the sentence together while making sure its grammar accuracy, then activating your vocal chords … but at the same time, another part of your mind is monitoring what you are doing, inspecting your own speech accuracy and pronunciation, keeping an eye of things, and quite in a sudden this (monitoring) part of your mind catches a wrong ending on the verb you are pronouncing, and right at the very second you manage to correct it just before it gets out of your mouth (with a slight hesitation).
While monitoring error may make a small contribution to accuracy through conscious reason, the research indicates that it is the acquisition that makes the major contribution to the development of natural accuracy. Besides, it is very difficult to keep every grammar rule consciously in your head while trying to have a conversation.
After studying some grammar rules and vocabulary, our students may immediately be able to produce some output and to translate a sentence or two, word-for-word, phrase-for-phrase, from Indonesian to English, but the result won’t probably sound as natural. It’s because each language has its own unique sensibility that cannot be fully captured to the other language through mere grammatical translation method taught in learning method.
One of the main functions of student output is thus to let the teacher know where students are in terms of their acquisition. If the teacher notices students having difficulty with something in particular, then the first thing the teacher might want to consider is to provide more examples of it in the input.
Watch the video below to explore this topic further.
school of delight 