Implications of Output Functions on College English Teaching

For a long time the importance of output has been underestimated in second language acquisition. With the constant emergence of some researches and investigations, the situation has been greatly improved. Among the researchers, Gass and Skehan explained the important roles which output play in second language acquisition in a detailed and exact way, such as hypothesis testing, receiving feedback, developing automaticity, syntactic processing, generating better input, developing skills and developing a personal voice, which have provided implications for our College English teaching. Inputbased teaching approaches are still dominant in the classroom in our country and the role of output is minimized. This is partly owing to our inadequate attention to the role of output in second language acquisition. Output-based teaching approaches should be adopted. In the classroom practice, output-based teaching approaches require teachers to provide students with adequate output-based assignments and activities. Keywords—second language acquisition; output; output functions; college English teaching