CONCLUSION

Young (1988b:128) concludes his own survey of input and interaction

research with the comment that there is still a great deal of beating about the
bush, by which he means that relatively few studies have tried to investigate to
what extent and in what ways input and interaction influence acquisition. One
reason for this is the methodological problems that input researchers face. In L1
acquisition research it is not clear how potentially confounding variables such as
the childs age and stage of development can be controlled so as to investigate the
effects of input on acquisition. In L2 acquisition research, this problem is
exacerbated by the difficulty of obtaining representative samples of the input that
individual learners receive, for where the L1 learner is situationally restricted to
interacting with a few identifiable interlocutors, the L2 learner, especially when
an adult, is not. Second, whereas a number of input studies on L1 acquisition
have been longitudinal, nearly all those into L2 acquisition have been crosssectional. Third, there has been an overreliance on correlational studies at the
expense of experimental studies, making it difficult to determine what is cause
and what is effect. Progress requires studies that (1) reliably sample the input
data, (2) are longitudinal, and (3) are experimental.
Despite these methodological problems, a number of insights regarding
the role of input and interaction have been gained. We have some understanding
of how interactional modifications affect the comprehensibility of texts. It is also
becoming apparent that different kinds of input and interaction are needed to
facilitate acquisition at different stages of learners development, and that input
and interaction may or may not affect acquisition depending on the nature of the
linguistic feature involved (consider the distinction between resilient and fragile
features, for example). We are still a long way from explaining how input interacts
with the learners internal cognitive mechanisms to shape the course of language
acqusiation, and even further from being able to assign any weighting to external
as opposed to internal factors. In all likelihood, input combines with other factors
such as the learners L1, the learners communicative need to express certain
meanings and the learners internal processing mechanism. No explanation of L2
acquisition will be complete unless it includes an account of the role of input,
but, as Sharwood Smith (1985:402) has noted input should be seen as just one in
a conspiracy of factors