It is important to understand what is said, but the intent is to learn to say everything elicited. Native speakers often highly value good pronunciation. Repetition helps things stick. Comprehensible output can become comprehensible input. You need exposure to language in a variety of social settings.
Language is used interactively in conversation.
Language has social meaning. If you want to communicate with speakers of a language, you will be more motivated to learn it. The audiolingual method of language learning, widely used in the seventies, was one production-driven approach. A similar and more recent book using substantially the same approach is Marshall 1989 . This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library , Version 3.5, published on CD-ROM by SIL International , 1999.