論 文

A Review of the Role of Output in Second Language
Acquisition with anecdotal examples froma Japanese learner’s experience

Jack Ryan

要

旨

第二言語習得のためにアウトプット仮説（Output Hypothesis，出力仮説という場合も）の役割。アウトプット仮説を提唱しているのは，語学学習者は言葉を完璧に習得するために行う三つの過程です。一つ目は，気づくこと（noticing）です。気づくこととは，表出することによって学
習者は現在の能力では言えないことを気づくということです。二つ目は仮説検証ということ（hypothesis forming and testing）です。仮説検証とは，学習者が現在の能力では言えないことに気づいたら表出を通して，仮説をたて検証することです。三つ目はメタ的語り（metatalk）です。メ
タ的語りとは，学習者が自分の発話に関して認知的に語ることです。ア
ウトプット仮説を提案したきっかけは，カナダのイマージョン・ポログ
ラムにおけるフランス語学習の成果とKrashenのインプット仮説（Input
Hypothesis ／入力仮説）からです。インプット仮説は提唱しているのは，
語学学習者が言葉を習得するために，現在の能力よりも少し高いレベルの多量のインプットを理解させることだけで，習得できる。カナダのイ
マージョン・ポログラムの学習者は，十分な現在の能力よりも少し高い
レベルの多量のインプットがあったのにも関わらず，文法面で言葉修得できなかったようでした。本題の中では，私は日本語習得する際の実体
験をアウトプット仮説の具体例として挙げている。

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Keywords: Output Hypothesis（アウトプット仮説／出力仮説），Input Hypothesis（インプット仮説（Input Hypothesis ／入力仮説），comprehensible output（理解できるアウトプット／出力），comprehensible input（理解できるインプット／
入力），noticing（気づくこと），hypothesis forming and testing（仮説検証こと），metatalk（メタ的語り），interlanguage（インターランゲージ）

BackgroundTo understand the output hypothesis I believe it is ﬁrst necessary to brieﬂymention the Input hypothesis as originally proposed by Stephen Krashen. Simply
put, Krashen believes that comprehensible input in the presence of a low aﬀective ﬁlter
is the only thing that can “cause” second language acquisition. In other words, if
second language learners are exposed to lots and lots of comprehensible input in a
non-stressful (or at least low-stress) situation they will acquire the second language.
This hypothesis seems reasonable enough until one considers the role of producing
language in it: None. There is no role for production. The hypothesis refers only to“input” not production or output. Therefore, based on this hypothesis a learner could
theoretically get tons of comprehensible input over years without ever speaking andthen one day open their mouth and speak ﬂuently. Of course, this (probably) never
happens and those who receive great portions of comprehensible input over timeachieve considerable ﬂuency in a second language as extensive studies of CanadianFrench immersion students has amply demonstrated.

Original Output Hypothesis
Ironically, some of the same studies that lent support to the notion that a great
deal of comprehensible input over time can lead to considerable ﬂuency also suggested
that comprehensible input was not enough to lead to completely ﬂuent and accurate
use of the target language. In a study conducted with Canadian immersion students,
Swain has shown that even though students had received abundant comprehensible
input in French and were somewhat ﬂuent in the language they had still not acquired
grammatical competence in the language. Immersion student’s achievement test scores― 40 ―

A Review of the Role of Output in Second Language Acquisition
with anecdotal examples from a Japanese learner’s experienceequivalent to those of students in the standard English program proved that the input
had indeed been comprehensible (the immersion students took the achievement tests
in French). Still, immersions students’ many syntactical errors in French conﬁrmedthat the target language grammatical system had not been fully acquired. This
information gave researchers cause to question whether comprehensible input really is
the only causal factor in second language acquisition. Swain suggested that “output”
was the missing factor and called the concept “comprehensible output” and has beencredited with ﬁrst articulating what has come to be called the “Output Hypothesis.”
It has been proposed (Swain 1995) that one possible way to account for the lackof grammatical accuracy was that learners were not being pushed to produce language
output. Swain theorized that learners in immersion settings were not “pushed” to a
deeper analysis of the target language grammar because they could get their meaningacross adequately without doing so. The idea, which sounds so commonsensical andintuitively appealing to me in my study of Japanese, is that producing comprehensible
output requires a learner to take a more active role than that required in listening.
Essentially, learners must work harder when producing language. This is at least
partially because when learners are producing comprehensible output they have (orshould have) a vested interest in being as accurate as possible. They are “stakeholders”
in what they produce, it is their creation. This is contrasted with comprehensible
input with which learners rarely, if ever, have a vested interest in what is said to them
(they do however have a presumed desire to understand what is being said!).
It has been proposed that comprehensible output may oﬀer at least three things
that input could not do. It could 1) Provide the learner with opportunities forcontextualized, meaningful use, 2) Allow them to test out hypotheses and 3) Forcethem to move from semantic to syntactic processing of the target language. I would
like to consider further the second and third of these three roles. Regarding the testingof hypotheses, the idea is that through their produced output learners can test andeither conﬁrm or deny hypotheses about the target language system. For example, if
I want to say, “Pass the salt, please” (a phrase used commonly, perhaps too commonly,
at a dinner table in North America) in Japanese and have never attempted to say thisphrase before perhaps I will say “Shio wo totte kudasai.” I form and test out thishypothesis despite the fact that: I have never heard the phrase spoken before, I have
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No. 17never said it myself, and I consider the Japanese verb “toru” (which becomes theimperative form “totte”) to mean “take” rather than “pass” in English. Despite all thisI test the hypothesis and ﬁnd that it is communicatively successful and seemingly
grammatically correct, as I have received no verbal or non-verbal feedback indicatingotherwise from my interlocutors. I therefore conﬁrm it as a successful hypothesis andassume it enters my interlanguage. This is an actual example from my experiencelearning Japanese, and I continue to use that phrase to this day so I hope it is correct!
As for the third possible role of output, while semantic processing may be suﬃcient todeal with comprehensible input when listening, the learner needs to attend to morethings and, as a result, more cognitive resources are needed when speaking. Therefore,
output essentially forces the speaker to pay more attention to grammar and engage indeeper syntactic processing. I experience this on a daily basis in my everyday life inJapan. All around me people are talking and I often feel I am listening intently trying
to pick up as much as I can of the conversations sometimes even checking myelectronic dictionary for words or phrases I have overheard. However, when someone
speaks directly to me I am instantly “on my guard” in eﬀect and my mind is racing to
try and form an appropriate response to their utterance. When I am producing
formulaic speech or clearly learned forms I can aﬀord to attend less fully. For example,
hen someone is kind enough to oﬀer polite encouragement by saying “Nihongo wo
jozu desu ne” (You speak Japanese quite well, don’t you.) I can aﬀord to attend lessfully in this interaction, as most foreigners in Japan for any length of time are likely tohave heard this phrase repeatedly whether we actually speak Japanese well or not! I
answer with a formulaic response of “Sonna koto wa arimasen” (No, not at all).
However, when I want to or have to get something new or complicated across I haveto scratch and use all the resources (admittedly limited) at my disposal.

Recent Developments
More recent research has largely provided support for the basic idea of the output
hypothesis. This research, conducted over the last ten years, has led researchers todevelop and reﬁne their conception of the output hypothesis. Research developmentssuggest that collaborative tasks (such as Information Gap activities) may be perhaps
one of the best ways to get students to produce comprehensible output. As has been
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A Review of the Role of Output in Second Language Acquisition
with anecdotal examples from a Japanese learner’s experience

noted (Swain, 1995) a reason these types of tasks and other kinds of pair and group
work activities may be useful is because, whereas individually learners may be novices,
working together they have access to their partner’s knowledge and can essentially “riseabove” their individual level of competence and become, temporarily and with thehelp of their partners, more proﬁcient “experts.” By doing this, learners working in apair can produce comprehensible output beyond their competence level and learnsomething new (or at the very least, consolidate existing knowledge).
It is generally agreed that, in terms of the output hypothesis, the above-mentioned
three possible roles can still be attributed to comprehensible output although they
have been modiﬁed slightly from earlier conceptions. Currently, the roles
comprehensible output may play are seen to be the following: 1) Comprehensible
output can lead a learner to “notice” the gap between what they want to say and what
they actually can say. Echoing the original form of the theory (and extending it just alittle), 2) comprehensible output often involves hypothesis forming and testing.
Finally, 3) comprehensible output can have a meta-linguistic function. This means it
can lead to “meta-talk,” or talking about language. It seems likely that task-based
collaborative activities may be most successful at acting on this third meta-linguisticrole of the three proposed roles of comprehensible output by eliciting “meta-talk.” I
frequently use task-based collaborative activities in my classroom here in Japan withlower-level students and I do notice “meta-talk” taking place often. Even so, it may bethat “meta-talk” is most desirable or relevant in the context of high-level but less thanaccurate learners where students have good ﬂuency in the target language but could
beneﬁt from being induced to discuss language in order to move forward and achieve
greater accuracy. Interestingly, while verbally produced output is probably the mostfrequent manifestation of comprehensible output it has been noted that output need
not necessarily be verbalized. Swain has suggested that learners may be “noticing” gaps
in their knowledge and “producing” language in their heads and furthermore thatstudies have shown that students learn through this “internal verbalization.”

Additional Personal Experiences
Of course, collaborative tasks, and many other activities and/or techniques, canbe adapted to focus on any or all of the three roles of comprehensible output. Certainly,― 43 ―

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No. 17classroom activities in traditional language classrooms can be designed (and are many,
many times everyday) to promote the production of comprehensible output. This
being the case, my own concept of the ﬁrst two possible roles of comprehensible
output (noticing and hypothesis forming and testing) seem to be more relevant innaturalistic learning settings. For example, when I am faced with the daily necessity
to speak Japanese outside the controlled environment of my Japanese language class Ivery frequently (discouragingly so) “notice” the gap between what I want to say andam able to say. Of course, it could be argued that in my Japanese learning situation
this is only because the overwhelming majority of my production situations occur “innature” but I don’t think so. It is precisely because they are real-life, everyday, relevant
situations in which I have a vested interest in understanding and being understood (ifI want to get internet access at my new apartment for example) that I notice my lackof competence and want to remedy the problem. In my case as a learner of Japanese,the “noticing” of a gap sometimes leads, in the same conversational exchange, to theforming and then testing of a hypothesis (if conditions are optimum). In these cases
I believe that I am operationalizing both of the ﬁrst two roles of comprehensible
output, namely noticing the gap in my knowledge and forming and testing hypotheses.
If, afterwards, I remember the situation and ask a Japanese colleague if my hypotheses(my utterances) were correct I could say that I am making use of all three of the rolesof comprehensible output. This seems an eminently intuitively appealing approach tolanguage learning and one major advantage we studying Japanese in Japan have over
our English students. We can, and do, use make use of the output hypothesis often in
our everyday lives without even thinking about it whereas our students often have noopportunity to do so other than one the controlled environment of one English class
90 minutes a week. Hence, the output hypothesis is another in a long line of researchsupported reasons to maximize student-talking time and minimize teacher-talking
time in our classrooms!
Perhaps one reason the comprehensible output hypothesis seems so credible tome is because when I do all of that described above I invariably retain the pertinentform(s). To illustrate I will share just one of my Japanese learning experiences which
I think illustrates the points made by the output hypothesis quite well. A few years
back, I wanted to ask about the Pottery class starting in April at a local community
center. I wanted to say something along the lines of “My friend and I would like to― 44 ―

A Review of the Role of Output in Second Language Acquisition
with anecdotal examples from a Japanese learner’s experiencejoin the Ceramics class. How do we apply?” My ﬁrst problem was that I wasn’t sure
how to say the word for ceramics so I formed a hypothesis and decided to say“yakimono” for “ceramics” which I thought meant roughly: yaki=“cooked or baked”
and mono=”thing(s).” I had a strong suspicion that this was incorrect but I hoped it
would be at least communicatively successful. My second problem was that I didn’tknow how to say, “How do I apply?” I quickly noticed the gap in my knowledge
during my conversation with the woman behind the counter as I struggled to makemyself understood (although the conversation hadn’t completely broken down so it
seemed to be at least somewhat communicatively adequate i.e. she knew or suspected
I was interested in a class they were oﬀering and was polite enough to try to help me
get my message across). It turned out that “yakimono” was the incorrect word, thecorrect one was “towgei.” As for the other problem, not knowing how to say “How do
I apply?,” after making a few unsuccessful attempts I took a diﬀerent tack. I
hypothesized that a useful rule in Japanese that allows you to say “How do I [insert averb] + suﬃx?” (or in Japanese “Do yatte [insert a verb] + suﬃx+ ii desu ka?”) would
work in this situation. The tricky part about this rule is that the verb requires a verb
suﬃx which was an area of confusion for me at the time, and remains so to this day.
In any case, I formed a hypothesis and said: “Do yatte moshiko ndara ii desu ka?” Thisutterance consisted of the “How do I” part “Do yatte,” the Japanese verb “moshikomu”
meaning “to apply” or “to sign up for,” the verb suﬃx “ndara” and the ﬁnal “ii desuka?” which, for the purposes of this example, makes the utterance a question. Whileperhaps not what a native speaker would say, this turned out to be successful bothcommunicatively and grammatically (as conﬁrmed later with the help of a Japanese
friend). So, in terms of this exchange I: a) noticed the gap in my knowledge, b)
formed and tested at least two hypotheses and then c) engaged in meta-talk about theexchange later (and, in a way, am doing so again right now as I write this). I think I
am safe in assuming that with all of the meta-talk concerning these speciﬁc forms it
will be a long time before I forget them.
A simple example from my students comes from a ﬁrst year university student
who recently asked me: “How long you sleep?” and I answered, “Excuse me” which
prompted the student to say “How long you sleep last night?” I contend that my“excuse me” made the student notice the gap and form and then test a hypothesis intrying to be understood. My answer to the second question was probably enough for― 45 ―

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him to conﬁrm the hypothesis. This is admittedly a simple example but it seems to me
to exemplify quite well the ﬁrst two roles of the output hypothesis. As for the thirdrole, I ﬁnd examples of meta-talk frequently in my classroom when doing collaborative
pair-work activities such as information gaps etc. I could say that it is unfortunate that
this meta-talk about English usually takes place in Japanese but I have just been
describing my meta-talk experiences in English and would prefer not to sound selfrighteous. Knowing that many English teachers in junior and senior high schools inJapan use the Grammar-Translation method and primarily speak Japanese in English
class while explaining grammar points to help their students prepare for the English
portion of their high school or university exams I have no doubt that lots of “talkabout language” does take place.

Theoretical Support
Support for the comprehensible output hypothesis comes from the work ofsocio-cultural theorists who maintain that social interaction is a critical factor inhuman psychological development. Socio-cultural theory claims that our higher
psychological processes are based on interactions with others. This implies that we are
more fully utilizing our cognitive resources when we are engaged in verbal interaction
with each other. From this perspective the use of langauge is more than communication,
it is something that triggers deep mental processes. It means that not only
communication but also signiﬁcant cognitive activity is taking place.
Socio-cultural theorists emphasize the importance of social interaction in
psychological development. Language development, when seen as a part ofpsychological development is what makes socio-cultural theory relevant to thecomprehensible output hypothesis. The comprehensible output hypothesis neatly
dovetails with socio-cultural theory as it claims that negotiation of meaning andinteractional exchanges that take place using comprehensible output lead to language
development and in fact are examples of language development. Just as socio-cultural
theorists have shown that social interaction leads to psychological development,
comprehensible output researchers, led by Swain, have produced evidence showingthat comprehensible output leads to language development. For example, it has beenshown that while addressing communication problems learners engage in mental― 46 ―

A Review of the Role of Output in Second Language Acquisition
with anecdotal examples from a Japanese learner’s experience

processes that have been shown to aid language acquisition.
Swain contends that when learners are engaged in meta-talk or otherwise talking
about language form they are actually engaged in language learning. Whereas Krashen
claims that comprehensible input, in and of itself, leads to language learning Swain
suggests that when learners are engaged in negotiation of meaning and talking about
language (namely “comprehensible output”) they are, in those moments, engaged inlearning language. When I reﬂect on my own experiences as both a language teacher
and learner I ﬁnd this contention very credible and intuitively appealing. Personally,
I know I seem to learn things better and retain them much longer when I am actively
noticing gaps in my verbal competence and forming and testing hypotheses about
Japanese. Although I do not yet have any ﬁrm scientiﬁc data to support this belief asregards Japanese students of English in Japan, my years of experience in this country
leads me to the ﬁrm belief that my students would agree.

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