After introducing active and passive voice to grade 6 students, a teacher set up a pair work activity: Student A takes a sentence of active voice from a book and conveys it to Student B in passive voice. Student B tries to guess what the active voice would have been. Student A modifies the passive voice if needed, repeatedly, till Student B guesses correctly. The above activity MOST closely represents...

After introducing active and passive voice to grade 6 students, a teacher set up a pair work activity: Student A takes a sentence of active voice from a book and conveys it to Student B in passive voice. Student B tries to guess what the active voice would have been. Student A modifies the passive voice if needed, repeatedly, till Student B guesses correctly. The above activity MOST closely represents... Correct Answer <span style="">Swain's Output hypothesis</span>

Language learning is a complex and multidimensional undertaking. While some research trends materialize on the horizon only to fade into the distance, other principles of language learning have become firmly established. 

• Among this reservoir of foundational principles is the notion that producing output is necessary to become a proficient language learner. Output is a central feature of language learning.

Key Points

• Ironically, some of the 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 had 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 students’ achievement test scores equivalent 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, immersion students’ many syntactical errors in French confirmed that the target language grammatical system had not been fully acquired.
• This information gave researchers cause to question whether comprehensible input really is the only cause factor in second language acquisition. Swain suggested that output was the missing factor and called the concept comprehensible output, which has come to be called the Output Hypothesis.
• The above-mentioned activity most closely represents Swain's Output Hypothesis as students are engaging in producing output in the form of active and passive voices.
• The Output Hypothesis proposes that in order to increase learners’ English proficiency, they need to generate output, to be specific, produce language via speech or writing and receive feedback on the comprehensibility of their output.
• It had been proposed by Swain in 1995 that one possible way to account for the lack of grammatical accuracy was that learners were not being pushed to produce language output.

Hence, it is clear that the above-mentioned activity most closely represents Swain's Output Hypothesis.

Additional Information 

• Krashen's Acquisition-Learning hypothesis: According to Krashen, there are two ways for second language learners to develop knowledge of a second language: 'acquisition' and 'learning'.In his view, we acquire as we are exposed to samples of the second language which we understand.
• Krashen's Input hypothesis: It refers to the relationship between what the learner is exposed to a language and language acquisition. It helps learners in language learning by making them able to communicate efficiently. It emphasizes putting comprehensible input slightly above the learner's current level.