There are two versions of the Input Hypothesis - the strong version and the weak version. The strong version is that input alone is sufficient which is almost proven by just looking at many immigrants who become very proficient in speaking their second language without getting any formal instruction. The weak version also has enough evidence all over the world. The weak version is that you can introduce form-focused instruction as long as it is not the core of the program and as long as it helps the input become more comprehensible.

But the strong version of the skill building hypothesis (skill-building alone) does not work. Even the weak version, where skill-building is the center of the program and comprehension-based activity is added, it is not as effective when compared to the weak version of the comprehension-based program. There is no evidence showing that skill building is necessary and should be the core of the program. Krashen has argued this numerous times in his writings.

I think many instructors need a much fuller understanding of comprehension-based acquisition theory. Furthermore, they need to consider whether the language program they are pursuing is theoretically consistent and experimentally justified.

How do you make books available? Bring them to class each week? Available in the school library? Students come to your office? Students buy themselves and trade?

Books are in the classroom for display. For home reading, they check books out from the IBU library.

How were your books purchased? Library funds? Research funds?

Library funds and department funds.

You mentioned your ER/FVR research with groups of students. Do you regularly do some kind of pre- and post-testing with your students to gauge gains for evaluation and/or research?

Yes. Not only to evaluate my own teaching, I also conduct pilot studies every year on a current issue of concern. Twenty years ago, the question I had was whether ER was better than IR. I found that it was. Then the second question was the effects of ER on writing. The answer was that the effect was significantly positive. The third question was whether summary writing in English after reading caused more improvement in writing. The answer was vague. The design did not tell what was the cause of writing improvement, reading or writing summaries. So, I compared two groups who did summary writing in English and summary writing in Japanese. The answer was that those who did summary writing in Japanese did significantly better. What a shock! Then I switched to the effect of story-listening on vocabulary. Since my TOEFL study (2006), I have been interested in the efficiency of comprehension-based methods. This year the question was whether non-English major male students who are unmotivated and are absent 30% of the time in the course will have a statistically significant improvement on a writing test for fluency and grammatical accuracy when the instruction is meaning-based. They had two English classes per week. One was my class, and the other was a grammar based intensive reading class. The data analysis showed that their written fluency tripled and their accuracy went up from 35% to 54% in 11 weeks.

Another study that I did this year was that I compared two groups of students, English majors who had seven classes per week (126 hours in class) and Health Science majors who had only one class per week (18 hours in class). I gave them both a cloze test and a writing test. Please note that I never teach them writing nor talk about summary writing. I don't even ask for book summaries in Japanese. For each book they read, students jotted down just a few lines (at most) on what the book was about in their FVR notebook. There was no other writing practice, no grammar explanation, no correction. The result was that the Health Science majors were much more efficient than the English majors, showing far more improvement for each hour of classtime (Mason, 2007).

6