Hi Douglas, thanks for your comment & for reading my articles! I’ve heard others question the value of working with a teacher before. I am happy to offer some ideas in response to what you wrote. I had some time so my reply got rather long!

It’s worth noting if we’re talking about the input hypothesis, that Dr. Krashen himself speaks about teachers’ role as helping learners gain language at least to the point where they can find materials and succeed at independent learning – an intermediate level of proficiency, he has said. I agree with him that a good teacher is more necessary for beginning learners, and over time learners may become more and more independent. Since I wrote these articles, I’ve completed a PhD program at the University of Iowa, Teaching and Learning, Foreign Language and ESL Education. In fact, I just graduated on May 13, 2022. One of my goals in getting the PhD was to explore other research relevant to comprehension-based language teaching and learning. I have found there to be additional support for the kinds of instructional practices and classroom teaching that are described in these articles from other models of language acquisition. For example, usage-based theories have investigated and traced input and features of that input to learner production (output), and sociocultural theories emphasize that language learning occurs within a social context, and consists not merely of cognitive changes but also of learning how to relate to other humans socially. Teachers can have a positive role in these perspectives as well. I do not see input-based language teaching & learning as just providing by teachers & receiving of content/input by students, but as a complex and dynamic process in which teachers & students are active cognitively, socially, and emotionally.

First, I’m not sure what you mean by “instruction.” Sometimes in Second Language Acquisition, instruction means something like “directly teach grammar rules” and explaining about language. The role and value of that kind of instruction is debated, and I lean towards those who think it’s not going to contribute much positively to proficiency and language ability. Instead of explanations about language, in case that was part or all of what you meant by instruction, I’m thinking of all settings in which a learner or learners are working with a teacher or tutor and in an online or in-person classroom setting to gain language. The teacher in this model is more like a supportive “language parent” (to use a term I learned from Chris Lonsdale). That’s the kind of model I have in mind to refer to “teachers” here, someone who facilitates language experiences tailored to the learners with them.

You mentioned some problems with teaching and input quality that certainly can be a problem, but I do not think are universally true about teachers. Teachers who have honed their skills at speaking in ways to make language comprehensible can provide high quality, personalized, interactive experiences through an input-based teaching approach. Comprehensibility does not have to mean overly distorted or overly simplified language. It can be ‘real’ although scaled to learners’ high comprehension. (There’s an interesting think piece by Michael Long, 2020, on that topic: Optimal input for language learning: Genuine, simplified, elaborated, or modified elaborated?) In a classroom with many learners, this takes skill, yet it is skill that I have seen many teachers achieve. They differentiate lessons by asking different questions of different learners, giving the more advanced ones to students whose skills are more advanced, without losing those who need more time to reach that. Is it constantly interesting to every person in the room all the time? No, but it can be enough. I have found that personalized, interactive, input-based teaching can engage students in lessons. This means the teacher asks questions to elicit the students’ interests, opinions, experiences, predictions about the topic, and imaginative ideas, and then uses their responses – even if they are just a head nod or a smile – to build topics through the language, even before students are especially verbal. My dissertation study was on that topic: how teachers and learners in online & hybrid, beginning-level Chinese classrooms used Chinese to develop topics, accompanied by evidence of student engagement and comprehension.

So is a teacher “necessary” for successful language acquisition? Not in an absolute sense, and some very special types of people do achieve high proficiency in languages working mainly on their own as you mentioned. But I do not think that type of learner is very typical of most people and how most people succeed. I think most of us, myself included, really benefit from the help and involvement of other people.

A few ways good teachers and instruction can be helpful:

– Many people prefer to work with a teacher who can steer towards level-appropriate resources and use them interactively and in an engaging way, rather than to work in isolation. Level-appropriate, interesting, personalized content for beginners in Chinese can be hard to find and sequence around one’s current vocabulary and comprehension level, especially learning to read. Chinese reading comprehension is especially challenging to find materials for, in my opinion, for beginners. I started making read-along videos & sharing them on YouTube publicly for this reason. But even so – the videos I have made are tailored to the students I work with and the lesson we just had, which included students’ own circumstances, background knowledge, interests, and ideas in the content. I don’t know how learners could get that kind of content without assistance from a teacher.

– Teachers can provide kind, supportive feedback about a student’s current progress in a way that at least some learners find difficult to assess for themselves. Preferably, a lot of that feedback happens as the teacher is responding to the students’ comments, questions, and seeing their interested or bored looks, and adjusting their talk and offering scaffolds to help ensure students’ comprehension.

– Through the kinds of tasks they create for class time, teachers can also offer a variety of ways for students to be engaged and active in an input-rich lesson. Such experiences can be very motivating — e.g., Printer, 2019, found TPRS to be so, and in an upcoming study I learned about recently, Gao did as well with high school students in Chinese classes. Motivation can mean longer involvement with language learning and reaching higher levels of proficiency.

– Interacting with others in a classroom can be a place of real language use. As the people in the room get to know one another, share experiences in the language, they are using language for real purposes. (This is an emphasis in Bill VanPatten’s writing about language classrooms.) Also, some authentic materials can be used earlier than students’ fully comprehend the language in them, such as in MovieTalk. Advanced proficiency in Chinese (or any other language) does take time, but I think it is possible to reach Dr. Krashen’s suggested intermediate level in classroom learning with teachers.

About cynicism: it could be said that I’m biased from what I saw and analyzed in classrooms in research during my PhD, as well as what I have experienced myself as a language learner & teacher. I would say it differently though: I’ve seen a lot of empirical evidence that teachers can be very beneficial, especially with novice learners. And cynicism can go in both directions! Could it sometimes be the case that some learners don’t want to (or maybe can’t) find and pay for a quality instructor, so they convince themselves that teachers couldn’t contribute positively to their language learning process? But I’d rather not assume the worst either of teachers or of learners. It’s possible for some learners to go it alone & achieve high proficiency, but it’s also possible for teachers to be very beneficial for learners.

Thanks for reading.

In addition to the fact that various language-learning methods ultimately based on the input hypothesis have produced remarkable results, I suspect that the hypothesis has become as popular as it has in the online language-learning world precisely because it dovetails with autonomous, self-paced, personalised learning. Not only do these methods not require instruction, but there is, in fact, a distinct anti-instruction sentiment amongst the most accomplished figures in the online language-learning community.

There appear to be numerous reasons for this sentiment, but I can only really speak for my own view, which is that all the principles and activities underlying the input hypothesis suffer as soon as instruction is introduced. The quantity of input is drastically reduced; the quality of that input is dubious; the pace is largely set by the slowest leaners; the material used in class cannot possibly be of interest to every student, so some students’ motivation and attention would be negatively impacted, thereby essentially nullifying the purpose of the input; and, of course, instruction time is limited, so the students spend years in an artificial bubble, only to discover that all that time was insufficient to prepare them for authentic material.

Naturally, I could offer a cynical response to why teachers see a need for themselves in the process, but it would be enlightening to hear others’ thoughts on this quandary.