. You also need to speak.
In particular, it appears that you will need to put a reasonable amount of effort into conversational speech. Sure, you could concentrate on monologues, say by making long speeches to large audiences, but you might not know whether anyone understood you. By contrast, when you engage in one-on-one conversational interaction with people, it will often become obvious that you have failed to communicate, or have miscommunicated. What is more, the people with whom you converse will be able to help you to find ways to say what you are trying to say. It seems reasonable to think that this would contribute to your language learning.
Conversational interaction is an important source of comprehensible input as well. When you are involved in conversing with people, they will tend to adjust their speech to your level of ability. They may speak more slowly than normal, and use simpler vocabulary and simpler sentence structures, and repeat themselves a lot, and reword their sentences whenever you appear to be having trouble understanding them. Listen to yourself the next time you are talking to someone with limited English ability. You will probably find that you make these types of changes in your own speech in order to help them to understand you. Michael Long has demonstrated that the types of changes people make in their speech when they talk to foreigners really do make a significant difference in the ability of the foreigners to understand them (Long 1985).
Consider the nature of a conversation between a sympathetic native speaker and you as a language learner. You have a meaning you wish to express. You make a stab at it, but the person with whom you are conversing is either unsure of what you meant, or wonders whether you really meant what you appear to have meant. So she helps you to clarify yourself. Likewise, when she says something to you, it may go over your head, and so you get her to clarify her meaning. This back and forth process of a language learner and a sympathetic native speaker working together to achieve success in conversational communication is referred to as the negotiation of meaning.
During Stage II, the most convenient context for conversational practice may be in structured language learning sessions, where someone is consciously helping you to learn the language. If you have one or more persons who are employed to help you on a daily basis, those people will be accustomed to speaking with you. They will have a good feel for your current level of ability, and thus will be in a good position to make sure that what they say to you is comprehensible. There is a low stress level involved in conversing with a familiar person in a familiar setting, when compared with conversing with all the people you happen to encounter out in the world at large.
In addition to formal language sessions, you will increasingly be able to engage in conversation with friends. For them, conversing with you is hard work at this point, so it requires some commitment on the part of your conversational partners. But again, people who know you well will be able to communicate with you far more effectively and easily than people who do not yet know you. With time, you can systematically expand the number of regular conversational partners with whom you visit (see Thomson, 1993c). So once you are past the very early stages of language learning, an obvious way to increase your comprehensible input is to engage in a lot of social visiting. You may not be a person who normally does a lot of social visiting. If so, it will help if you can view social visiting as part of your daily work routine.
Not all of your early speaking efforts need to be in the form of two-way conversation in the strictest sense. As a matter of fact, while you are first trying to loosen up your tongue and develop some fluency in the language, you will benefit a great deal from activities in which you do most of the talking. These activities are probably best carried out in formal language sessions, where you are employing someone who understan